CHAPTER TWO
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T
he 1890s was a decade for the cyclists. Despite an economic tailspin, thousands of American workers produced millions of bicycles. Miles and miles of bicycle paths flowed in and out of metropolises. Bicycle clubs formed in big, medium-, and tiny-sized cities. New York was at the heart of the American cycling renaissance. As Stephen Crane wrote about his adopted hometown, “everything is bicycle.”1
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In 1896, just in Manhattan, there were at least fifty-six bicycle dealers and scores of how-to-ride-a-bicycle academies. Newspapers featured daily stories of the wheelmen’s “gossip” and entire pages devoted to cycling. New Yorkers rode on the greatest bicycle path in the world, argued the most about where and how bicycles belonged, and invented a future in which bicycles crisscrossed the city, reshaping the physical, social, and cultural landscape along the way. Teetering on the edge of modernity, New Yorkers dreamed of a new kind of city: a cycling city.2 In 1898, New York became Greater New York, as the five boroughs joined in a massive metropolis home to more than twice as many people as the nation’s second largest city. Already the well-worn seat of American capitalism, New York City was still growing in size and significance. Age-old questions about how to manage—how to govern, how to deliver public services to the masses, how to cater to industrial titans and protect the vulnerable—took on new meaning. Bicycles tapped into these larger conversations about the failures of urban life and utopian visions of a city remade. New Yorkers in the 1890s were already desperate for ways to escape crowds, navigate freely and independently, and exercise mind and body in a city perceived as toxic. It was in New York—big, dense, chaotic—where bicycles appeared in the greatest numbers and where they seemed to offer the greatest promise: of faster commutes, healthier bodies, a cleaner city, richer social opportunities, independence from streetcars, and the freedom to roam. Before the age of the automobile, it was the bicycle that promised private transit for all and a new way to envision an old city. In short, the bicycle offered hope. Among a sea of more than 3.4 million New Yorkers, hundreds of thousands of whom could reasonably be called cyclists, were Arthur Hyde and Violet Ward. Their accounts, documented in “wheeling diaries,” scrapbooks, letters, and photographs, tell a larger story about cyclists and the city, revealing that bicycles and bicyclists did not always live on the periphery. Hyde, Ward, and New Yorkers at large honestly believed that the bicycle was reshaping their city—for better or worse.
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Arthur Hyde Arthur Penrhyn Stanley Hyde was born in 1875 and lived first in Newark and then Manhattan, with regular time spent in and around the New York area. While he toyed around on a child-sized velocipede as a boy, adults rode high-wheelers. But as he aged, so did the bicycle.3 By the time he was eighteen, the disproportioned two-wheelers had largely disappeared. In their stead, and in much higher numbers, “safety” bicycles, with two equal-sized wheels, a diamond frame, and pneumatic tires, exploded in popularity. Although it typically had only one gear and no brakes, the safety bicycle was heralded as a technological marvel— deservedly so, considering that the bicycles New Yorkers ride today look quite similar. Easier and safer to ride, deemed more appropriate for women (because they were easier and safer to ride), and much cheaper than the high-wheelers, safety bicycles enchanted New Yorkers and Americans at large.4 Hyde’s first ride on a safety did not go well: “I thought it was an easy thing . . . the next thing I knew I had pitched over into the gutter.” But before long he was off exploring the city and beyond. At first he rented from a dealer on Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, and within days he bought his very first bike, a “Referee Cushion Tired Wheel” from a shop downtown on Chambers Street.5 We know these details, and many more, from Hyde’s meticulous recordkeeping. In and of itself, the practice of documenting one’s mileage, the routes taken, and bicycles bought and repairs rendered was not altogether unusual. But Hyde’s “wheeling diary” is unusually rich. From 1893 to 1896, covering some 6,811 miles, and over four volumes and 364 pages, Hyde’s diary illuminates many dimensions of New York’s cyclescape. Hyde’s first bicycle, according to the list price, was just over $100 and, like most bicycles at the time, was a luxury item. But many buyers, Hyde included, never paid full price. He fed his appetite for bikes through active participation in the secondhand market. His first bicycle was a used version that set him back only $40. He later traded it in to help pay for his second one, a Liberty Scorcher, and when he purchased a Bohemian in 1895—already discounted from the retail price of $85 down to $60—he 37
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figure 2.1 In his wheeling diary, Arthur Hyde documented each of his rides and also included photographs, ephemera, letters, and drawings, including this portrait of himself drawn by his good friend and frequent cycle companion, Harry White. Arthur P.S. Hyde Diaries, 1892–1896, Volume 1, sketch p. 39–41. BV Hyde, Arthur P., New-York Historical Society Library
offset the cost by raffling off his old bike. Hyde raised $45 and the winner paid just 28 cents. The effort was well worth it: “It is a bird!, 23 pounds, 72 gear, 24 inch frame, T saddle post, Sager A Saddle, Morgan and Wright tires, Elm-Plymouth interlocked rims, in fact a genuine upto-date 1895 wheel.” But soon it was time to trade in the Bohemian for a Model D road racer (“she is a cooker! 80 inch gear!! Gee whiz!!!”). Though it was listed in the catalog for $100, he owed only $30 “to boot” after a trade-in.6 Over the course of three years, Hyde bought five bicycles, never paying anywhere close to catalog price even when he did splurge for new models. Dealers also encouraged purchases on installment plans. After a trade-in and for a mere $5 deposit, Hyde rode his Liberty Scorcher home. Moreover, retail prices fell steeply over the course of the 1890s as production swelled.7 Even though he was always looking for a deal, Hyde had money. He lived comfortably with his family on the Upper East Side. His mother
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did not work, his family was listed in the Social Register, and he was able to attend private schools. His family also had deep American roots. With ancestors dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, the Hydes faced few of the challenges that met the million recently arrived immigrants who also called New York home.8 Recent immigrants or not, most New Yorkers still would have considered the bicycle an extravagance. Even those with secure wage work would have had to save carefully to afford one. Button backers earned, on average, $1.66 a day. Silk dyers made $1.83 and bookbinders $2.83. Even for those with more skilled jobs, like plumbers ($3.50 day) and bricklayers ($4 day), a new high-quality bicycle meant several weeks’ worth of wages. Nevertheless, when a Lower East Side factory worker recorded in her 1897 account book that she was putting aside $1 out of her regular $12-per-week paycheck to pay off a bicycle, she was not alone. The poorest New Yorkers might never become cyclists, but many others did. And as was the case with the earlier bicycle booms, boosters imagined that everyone would soon be able to afford a set of wheels and enjoy the mobility it offered.9 For the New Yorkers who did ride, bicycles often proved the speediest way to get around a city with streetcars limited by fixed tracks and schedules. The bicycle was now a viable form of transportation. Hyde, an assistant instructor in military tactics, biked his way up to the Barnard School for Boys on 125th Street, where he had once been a student. He also found cycling the easiest way to make day-to-day stops, riding to church, the post office, and the homes of friends and relatives. He regularly pedaled to recreational spots, including the Polo Grounds, the Upper Manhattan horseshoe-shaped home of the New York Giants baseball team. From his residence on Eighty-Fourth Street just east of Fifth Avenue, it took about twenty-five minutes each way. And on one occasion, it was by bicycle that he could most quickly deliver the sad news to his siblings: Grandpa Hyde was dead.10 As the number of cycling trips increased, so did the demand for bicycle parking. Bicycle racks sprouted outside ice cream parlors, churches, and office buildings. (With such public outdoor parking came bike theft, and thus, bike locks.) Some destinations even had bicycle valets. Private
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residences, like three French-inspired limestone townhouses built in 1898 near Riverside Drive, had dedicated space for bicycles. Each unit came with a bicycle room tucked away off the first-floor hallway. Stately apartment buildings catered to cycling tenants too. The Woodbury and Elmscourt on the corner of Madison Avenue and Ninety-Fifth Street and the Cherbourg on Ninety-Second Street and Central Park West advertised shared bicycle rooms in the basement.11 The same bike could serve multiple purposes. Hyde often rode to get somewhere and, like most other cyclists, took even more trips just for the fun of it. When on one of his regular “runs” to bicycling hotspots—along Riverside Drive, around Grant’s Tomb, and down the Boulevard (as New Yorkers called the stretch of Broadway north of Columbus Circle)—Hyde found crowds of men and women on wheels doing the same thing, delighting in seeing and being seen. The Boulevard was an especially crowded
figure 2.2 A woman hands off her bicycle to a valet at the Bronx Zoo. Woman checking her bicycle, New York Zoological Gardens, Bronx, N.Y. undated, [c. 1899], glass negative. George Ehler Stonebridge Photograph Collection, New-York Historical Society PR066_1461
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figure 2.3 One of Hyde’s favorite places to ride was around Grant’s Tomb on Riverside Drive. Frequently, he would make several loops around the memorial. He was not alone. As Hyde wrote in 1895: “at almost any hour of the day, may be seen scores of wheelmen and wheelwomen, their wheels standing in the gutter, while they are reclining on the benches, enjoying the cool breezes which one almost invariably finds here.” Cyclists on Riverside Drive near Grant’s Tomb, 127th Street, 1898. Photograph, PR 068, New-York Historical Society Library, 82477d; “A Tour of New York’s Parks,” The LAW Bulletin and Good Roads, August 16, 1895, 15–17
spot. Traffic counters standing at one corner on a spring day in 1896 observed more than 14,000 cyclists cruising by over a 16-hour period (roughly one cyclist every 4 seconds).12 The crowds of cyclists included men and women together, a much more common sight than in previous eras. While the practice of cycling did not alone revolutionize how women and men socialized in the city, it did play a role in challenging social conventions, including how they interacted in public and how they dated. For Hyde, the bicycle proved a useful tool to meet women. In April 1894, he rode to Madison Avenue in midtown to make a “call on Elsa”; a few months later they were playing tennis 41
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figure 2.4 Many cyclists, Hyde included, enjoyed social rides in the evening. Indeed, traffic counts on the Boulevard indicated that the most popular hour was between 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. and the second most popular was between 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. Here is a busy Fifth Avenue (at Forty-Fourth Street) after dark. Charles W. Jefferys, Fifth Avenue at Night, Looking North from Delmonico’s at Forty-Fourth Street, 1899. Wallach Division Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
together. In the summer of 1895 he bicycled over to Lena’s house. Soon they could be found sitting together “under the trees.” A couple of days later, he went back to see her, but “Mr. V.” would not let him in. Unfazed, Hyde biked over to Alice Robinson’s house to make another call.13 On more than one occasion, he hired wheels for “the girls” to try out. At least once, he gave a young woman riding lessons, practicing in front of the Museum of Natural History. On a multiday bicycle trip, he enjoyed dinner with “a charming girl from Germantown,” and when on 42
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a steep hill near Douglaston, he met “a very pretty girl” who could not quite pedal up the climb. He regularly went for bicycle rides with Mable and others—never with a chaperone. For a period in the spring of 1896, Hyde rode nearly every day to visit Helen, one of his occasional riding partners, near her 126th Street home. Circling the neighborhood on two wheels, he sometimes found her. Sometimes he spied her only at a distance, and sometimes, to his terrible disappointment, he could not find her at all. It was by bicycle that he rode to Helen’s graduation, seeing her for “probably the last time for two years.” But he was not one to wait around. Within a week, he was out riding with Ethel. And in 1900, he married Lena, presumably the very same Lena with whom he had “sat under the trees,” biked to an ice cream parlor, and often visited via two wheels.14 Dating is conventionally understood as a twentieth-century phenomenon with young couples venturing out, replacing the intricate system of making calls and getting to know one another inside parlor rooms with family members watching, or at least hovering nearby. Thanks to the mobility it afforded and the changing customs it portended, the bicycle offered a way to recast social relationships.15 Aside from dating, the bicycle unlocked new social opportunities. Bicycle clubs began to appear in nearly every neighborhood. Between 1894 and 1898 there were about 220 bicycle clubs in Manhattan and Brooklyn. (That is almost as many bicycle clubs as there are Starbucks locations today! And with less than half as many New Yorkers back then.) As costs dropped throughout the decade and as consumers, like Hyde, found ways to lessen purchase prices, the pool of riders became much more diverse. The individual organizations, a handful of which were holdovers from the high-wheel era, included clubs for immigrants; Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Danish Americans, and Italian Americans started their own groups. There was the Alpha Wheelmen for “colored” members; up to this point, almost all New York cyclists had been white. The Pioneer Cycle Club was for women and run by women (though it later admitted men), a far cry from when male entrepreneurs encouraged women to attend ladies-only classes at their indoor velocipede rinks. The Fanwood Quad Club consisted entirely of “deaf mutes.” There was the Apothecaries’ Bicycle Club for pharmacists, the 43
figure 2.5 Between 1894 and 1898 the headquarters of two hundred bicycle clubs spanned much of the city, but were clustered in the lower half of Manhattan and the western section of Brooklyn. There were many more clubs, some of which did not have an official headquarters and others for which an address could not be located. Map by the author
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Federal Wheelmen for letter carriers, and the Metropolitan Stenographers in Manhattan (Brooklyn had its own stenographer bike club). Neighborhoods boasted their own clubs, including the Bushwick Wheelmen, Chelsea Wheelmen, Greenpoint Wheelmen, Park Slope Wheelmen, Windsor Terrace Wheelmen, and Yorkville Wheelmen. Some clubs, like the Ocean Parkway Wheelmen, even organized around particular streets.16 Clubs both promoted the idea of the bicycle as a democratizing and Americanizing force—a tool for New Yorkers to socialize and express their identity—and exposed its limits—most clubs catered to the wellto-do and were segregated by race, class, ethnicity, or gender. The official clubhouses were often guarded spaces and quite elaborate. The Long Island Wheelmen, for example, built their headquarters on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, a hotspot for biking since the velocipede days. The threestory facility decorated with frescoes on the inside and a large, windowstudded copper oriel on the outside was hard to miss. The Long Island Wheelmen (members, who averaged thirty-seven years of age, jokingly
figure 2.6 The Long Island Wheelmen’s Club Headquarters, 1890. Harper’s Weekly, August 30, 1890, 672
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referred to themselves as “Old Fossils”) enjoyed full use of the space, outfitted with a bowling alley, billiard room, gym, parlor, lockers, fireplace, and separate rooms for officers, ladies, and servants.17 Hyde belonged to the Tiffany Wheelmen, a group of cycling enthusiasts who worked at Tiffany & Co. His father was a longtime employee, and Arthur worked intermittently for the firm between 1893 and 1895. Like the New Yorkers who shopped there, Tiffany & Co. caught bicycle fever. In 1896, bicycles began to show up in its annual catalog and storefronts. Most famously, the company began to “Tiffany-ize” existing wheels for wealthy clientele, including a Columbia model embellished with a silver frame and ivory handlebars that eventually sold for $5,000. Members of the club included its captain, John T. Curran, famous for designing the “Magnolia Vase,” an ornate heap of silver put on display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and Frank Spengler, a silversmith from the Lower East Side who learned the trade from his German-born father. As was typical, the Tiffany Wheelmen took group rides to Long Island, raced to Coney Island, and fraternized with fellow members.18 Hyde was also a member of the largest and most powerful organization of cyclists: the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) that Kirk Munroe cofounded in 1880. By the late 1890s, it boasted over 100,000 members; as a sign of New York’s prominence in the cycling world and national bicycle politics, roughly a quarter of LAW members hailed from the Empire State. It had also greatly expanded its political influence. Presidential nominating conventions included “good roads” platforms pushed by the league; President William McKinley (and many other politicians) wooed members and sought the wheelmen’s vote; and when Theodore Roosevelt was a vice-presidential candidate in 1900, he was also, the league magazine made sure to note, a card-carrying member from New York.19 So was Arthur Hyde, who convinced his friends to join, stayed at LAWsponsored hotels while on long trips, and contributed to the weekly LAW Bulletin and Good Roads journal. One of his articles offered advice on how best to exit the man-made city and find natural splendor in the Hudson Valley and out on Long Island. But one need not go that far; as Hyde wrote (in the third person): “The writer believes that one may see more of nature in her primitive loveliness, visit more interesting, historical 46
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figure 2.7 To create the cycling maps that would be included in Fifty Miles Around New York, Hyde conducted his own research, measuring distances and noting turns, hills, paving conditions, and landmarks. This particular map was the first, southern section of three maps intended to guide cyclists from midtown Manhattan to Portchester. His other maps illustrated preferred routes to Poughkeepsie and Tarrytown. League of American Wheelmen, Fifty Miles Around New York: A Book of Maps and Descriptions of the Best Roads, Streets and Routes for Cyclists and Horsemen (New York: New York State Division of the League of American Wheelmen, 1896)
and romantic ground, and in general, spend a more enjoyable day within the city limits of New York than by going a hundred miles into the country in any direction.” Hyde also compiled maps and bicycling routes for the popular Fifty Miles Around New York.20 One favorite club activity was the bicycle parade. In their earliest iterations, the marches on wheels often had a political bent, like the annual high-wheeler parades the LAW had organized that aimed to convince the Central Park commissioners to lift the ban on bikes. But throughout the mid-1890s, most bicycle parades were social and celebratory in nature. There was a lot more to celebrate now: new bicycle paths, throngs of new riders, and city politicians listening attentively to the cyclists’ demands. As a show of the force and volume of city bicyclers, the parades were mutedly political too. Hyde participated in two of the largest. The first was in Brooklyn and on the most remarkable pieces of bike-specific infrastructure yet built in the United States. 47
PRAISE for
O N B I CYC L E S
“In On Bicycles, Evan Friss fills in the missing chapters that bicycles hold in New York City’s near-miraculous transportation history and shows how the city’s streets are finally catching up with them.”—Janette Sadik-Khan, Bloomberg Associates, former NYC transportation commissioner “This social history of the transformation of New York’s relationship to cycling is elegantly researched, gracefully written, and nearly as delightful as the bicycle itself.” —Kim Phillips-Fein, author of FEAR CITY: NEW YORK’S FISCAL CRISIS AND THE RISE OF AUSTERITY POLITICS “Two hundred years ago, the first riding machines that resembled what would become bicycles began pouring into Manhattan, and New York City would never be the same again. On Bicycles is brilliantly researched, noting the battles against local government, sexism, the automobile, and the railways, as the bicycle fought its way to become more popular today than ever before. Vive le vélo!”—Phil Liggett MBE, “The Voice of Cycling” “Witty and wise, engaged and engaging, surprising, fun and fabulous—I’m running out of adjectives to describe Evan Friss’s wondrous new book. Move over Amsterdam: New York City is a bicycling city too, though with fits and starts, grunts and guffaws, and more than a handful of bike haters (some in high places). A great way to learn about the history of the city that never sleeps—and has never stopped arguing about its bicycles and bicyclists.”—David Nasaw, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History, CUNY Graduate Center “A fresh and personalized perspective on what the bicycle has meant to New Yorkers over the years.”—David Herlihy, author of BICYCLE: THE HISTORY “A superb history of New York’s cycling cultures over the last two centuries, On Bicycles surveys the evolution of the bicycle in the city from urban menace and medium of feminist liberation to weekend joyride and mainstay of the transportation network. Written with verve and precision, it reads like a long glide down Broadway with the wind at your back, catching green light after green light.”—Samuel Zipp, author of M ANHATTAN PROJECTS : THE RISE AND F ALL OF U RBAN RENEWAL IN COLD WAR NEW YORK “An essential contribution to multiple fields—New York history, transportation history, urban history, and planning history—this compelling and fascinating story takes you along with ease, artfully offering a barrage of digestible information, including previously unknown morsels. Even the most well-read New Yorkers, cyclists, and urban historians will find something new here.”—Owen Gutfreund, Hunter College PRINTED IN THE USA
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York cup.columbia.edu
ISBN: 978-0-231-18256-0
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