The Sacrilege of Cycling In The Park

Once, I rode through a gate of Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.  I'd visited the necropolis before:  Two of my relatives, as well as some far-more-famous people, are buried there.  Being the naif I was, I figured that if pedestrians and motor vehicles were allowed, so were bikes.

Well, I was a few bicycle lengths into the graveyard when someone on a motor scooter pulled up alongside me.  "No bikes allowed," he bellowed.

"Oh, sorry.  I didn't know..."

"This is sacred ground, you know."

Well, that part I didn't know:  I figured that since Greenwood was non-sectarian, it wasn't "sacred."  Also, since I've slept in graveyards twice in my life and the residents didn't seem to mind, it didn't occur to me that any of Greenwood's denizens would object to my quiet two-wheeled vehicle.

Apparently, that "sacred ground" rationale is used to ban bikes from cemeteries all over the world.  I don't understand how a bicycle is more sacrilegious than, say, a van with "Puppies" and "Free Candy" painted on its side. 

It's also the so-called reasoning behind the Frankfort (KY) city commission's vote to ban bicycles from Leslie Morris Park, the site of the US Civil War site of  Fort Hill .  The Commissioners, with Mayor Bill May casting the deciding vote, cited Fort Hill's status as "hallowed" ground: A local militia deterred an attempted raid by a Confederate cavalry unit in 1864.  Although Kentucky didn't secede from the Union during the Civil War, an attempt was made to set up a Confederate government in Bowling Green.  Had the raid succeeded, Frankfort--which was staunchly pro-Union--could have fallen to the Confederates, and Bowling Green would then have been the capital of the Confederate State of Kentucky.  While such a turn of events might not have tipped the war to the Confederates, it almost certainly would have prolonged the war and delayed a Union victory.

In any event, cyclists had been riding on the rudimentary trails around Fort Hill.  Some of those trails were little more than traces formed by deer that populate the 120-acre park, and most were laced with thorny bushes.  Some cyclists, like Gerry James, enjoyed the challenge they posed.  More important, he says, was the opportunity to ride so close to his downtown home.

What makes the new ban so galling to him and others is that it came in the wake of another plan, recently scuttled, to develop those paths so they could be used by runners and joggers as well as cyclists and others who want to spend some time outdoors.  In fact, an elaborate plan was developed that would have kept those lanes at least 300 feet from any historical, environmental and archaeological sites.  Moreover, its costs were minimal and some of the work would have been done by volunteers, including Scouts who were trying to attain the Eagle rank.

A Civil War commemoration at Leslie Morris Park, site of the Fort Hill monument.  From the Frankfort State Journal.

The project, which had many proponents, was seen as a way to make an historic site accessible to more people and connect it to the downtown area.  It was also viewed as a way to encourage exercise in a state with some of the worst health outcomes (though, interestingly, one of the lowest rates of chlamydia) in the nation.  Business leaders, too, liked it because they believed that it would bring investment to an area that, while economically stronger than the rest of the state, still does not attract or retain young talent.

One reason why the young leave the city and state is because projects like the Fort Hill trails are cancelled, or aren't even conceived in the first place. Of the vote, James--who founded the Explore Kentucky initiative--said, "It makes Frankfort look like an anti-progress city."

My First View, From A Bike

Yesterday I rode Zebbie, my 1984 Mercian King of Mercia, through the brownstones and rowhouses of Queens and Brooklyn.  Such a ride could easily involve a trip across the Kosciuszko Bridge, now that it has one of the better bike-pedestrian lanes in this city.

And so it was yesterday.  Tourists on Citibikes almost always ride across the Brooklyn Bridge for the views.  But no longtime New York resident does that.  Rather, in-the-know Big Apple cyclists opt for the Williamsburg Bridge or, if we simply want a visually interesting ride, the Kosciuszko.

In the spring and summer, the view consists mainly of skyscrapers foregrounded by trees and the factories and warehouses along Newtown Creek.  But the denuded limbs of winter reveal a landscape of differing verticalities. (Does that sound like a geeky phrase or what?)

When I lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn, one of my worst fears was--moving to Queens.  Mind you, I took many good rides, and enjoyed other activities, in "the world's borough."  But my first glimpse of it came from my family's car, en route to visit relatives:

Tell me, how would you feel about a place if the first thing you saw in it was a cemetery?  I'm guessing that I probably saw it for the first time on a winter day like yesterday, with leafless trees screening, but not shielding, the tombstones.  

But I did eventually move to Queens--to Long Island City, not far from where I live now.  Since then, I've visited Calvary Cemetery.  I know that there are tours of some of this city's necropoli, like Greenwood and Woodlawn.  Anyone who has a taste for such things (which I do, sometimes) should also go to Calvary.  Largely before of it, there are--wait for it--more dead than living people in Queens. (Thomas Wolfe once claimed, "Only the dead know Brooklyn."  What would he have said about Queens?)  In fact, more people are buried in Calvary than in any other American cemetery--or than live in Chicago!

Like Greenwood and Woodlawn, Calvary is the final resting place for some famous and infamous people, as well as everyday New Yorkers.  Also in common with them, Calvary began after the 1840s cholera epidemic: At that time, most of Queens and the farther reaches of Brooklyn and the Bronx (the locations of Greenwood and Woodlawn, respectively) were rural. And there wasn't enough room left in Manhattan to bury the victims of that epidemic, so the city mandated that they be interred elsewhere. 

All of those cemeteries have chapels large enough for masses or services.  But Calvary has a full-blown cathedral (not visible in these photos) at least somewhat reminiscent of the Sacre Coeur in Paris.

It's ironic that those same trees I saw yesterday obscure the tombstones in spring and summer.  Could their lush leafage during those seasons be nourished by the "residents" of Calvary?

Riding To Ride, Again

A month has passed since I came home from visiting my parents in Florida.  Today I did something I hadn't done since returning: I took a bike ride that wasn't a commute or errand, or wasn't in some other way utilitarian.

I got on the bike with no specific plan other than to pedal toward Rockaway Beach and do whatever came next.  Rockaway is about fifteen miles (25 km) from my apartment.  So, I reasoned, even if I pedaled there and back, it was a reasonable ride--especially if I rode it in a fixed gear.

So out Tosca, my Mercian fixie, came.  I had another reason for riding her today:  I had just cleaned up Arielle, my Mercian Audax, and Vera, my green Mercian mixte.   Part of the clean-up included installing new chains and cassettes. I hadn't yet done the same for Tosca, though I plan to do so.  (I probably won't change the chain, though:  1/8" chains don't wear nearly as quickly as 3/32" chains  used with derailleurs.)  I figured that there was still some slop on the streets, so if I got some in Tosca's drivetrain, it will give me incentive to clean her up.  

Oh, I had one other reason to ride Tosca:  the course would be flat.

Riding her felt great.  So great, in fact, that I didn't turn around at Rockaway Beach.  Instead, I decided to ride along the ocean from Rockaway to Riis Park and across the bridge to Brooklyn, where I'd continue pedaling along the ocean to Coney Island.  

It was a lovely ride in the late-afternoon sun (I woke up late today!) even though for most of it, I was pedaling into 25-35 KPH wind, which blew out of the west.  Of course, there was something else in the west:

I would ride alongside that sunset from Coney Island all the way up to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.  When I reached the end of the promenade, the sky was darkening and I reached into my seat bag for my lights.  I figured I would ride to Greenwood Cemetery (about 3 km) or Barclays Center (another 3 km) and decide whether to dodge the drunk trust fund kids who, I figured, would be tumbling out of bars and onto the streets and bike lanes of Williamsburg.

At Barclays, I decided to continue, as I was feeling good and traffic had been lighter than I expected.  Best of all, I didn't see any of the drunk trust fund kids tumbling ouot of bars.  Maybe it was too early for that (though, I must say, I've seen them not long after noon on weekends!).  There weren't even many cyclists on the Kent Avenue bike lane, especially given how mild the weather was for this time of year.

So...I did 85 kilometers today.  Yes, they were flat.  But I did them on a fixed.  And I rode into the wind for about 25 of those kilometers.  Oh, why am I counting anything?  I had a really nice ride. I'm happy.

Why Are Bike Lanes Seen As Conduits Of Gentrification?

When the bike lane came to Crescent Street, people didn't wonder whether they'd be priced out of the neighborhood.  It didn't price me out:  My rent was the same on the day I moved as it was three and a half years earlier, when the bike lane opened.  I moved mainly because a senior apartment (don't tell anybody!) became available.

But others see those green strips of asphalt with white borders (or, in some cases, bollards or other separators) as conduits of class warfare.  While they might own their homes, they worry about the face and faces of their communities changing.  

Such anxieties are felt and expressed (sometimes overtly) mainly in older white working-class enclaves and communities of color.  From Hasidic Jews and other religious conservatives who don't want "scantily clad" cyclists (and "sexy-ass hipster girls") rolling past their abodes to working parents who ferry themselves to work and their kids to school in cars and minivans and complain they "can't park" and they're "always stuck in traffic" to poor Blacks and Hispanics who feel abandoned by their cities and country, people in communities where few adults ride bikes for recreation (and certainly aren't riding the latest carbon-fiber technowonder) see cyclists--especially cycling activists and advocates--as younger, whiter, richer or more libertine than themselves.  Oh, and many of us are childless or have only one child, in contrast to the large families many poor, religious and other people support.

So in a way, I can understand why some people sigh "There goes my neighborhood!" when a bike lane comes to their doorstep. To put it in pedantic, schoolmarmish terms, they are equating correlation with causation.  That is also understandable:  When people don't know the underlying reasons for a phenomenon, they tend to link any two events they see simultaneously.  And it's true that in my hometown of New York, you are more likely to ride in a bike lane if you're on the Upper East Side of Manhattan than if you're living and riding in the decidedly non-gentrified, non-hipster Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York.  

In my observation, if there is any cause-and-effect relationship between bike lanes and gentrification, it's actually the reverse of what many people believe:  If anything, gentrification leads to the building of bike lanes in one neighborhood.  Those paths are usually constructed along long corridors that lead from one neighborhood into another. So a lane like the one along Kent Avenue in Brooklyn began in the gentrified/hipster areas of Greenpoint and North Williamsburg and was extended down to the ungentrified areas of South Williamsburg, where most residents are members of large Hasidic families.  And another Brooklyn bike lane, along Fourth Avenue, extends from the mostly White and Middle Eastern enclaves of Bay Ridge through the mainly immigrant Chinese and Mexican communities in Sunset Park and, from there, into working-class neighborhoods near Greenwood Cemetery and on to uber-gentrified Park Slope.

If anything, such lanes should be equalizers:  People from poor as well as affluent communities can use them to bike (or ride their scooters) to work, school, shop or just for fun. I think, perhaps, more people would see them that way if more bike activists and advocates looked and talked (ahem) less like me!

Bicycle Safety In The City: It's About Him

I have long said that much of the opposition to bicycle infrastructure--or simply encouraging people to get out of their cars and onto a saddle--is really class-based resentment.  In other words, people who are upset when they see bike share docks taking up "their" parking spaces or a bike lane that takes "their" traffic lane away believe that liberal elites are coddling privileged young people who are indulging in a faddish pastime and simply won't grow up.

What they fail to realize is that creating awareness and infrastructure doesn't just protect trust fund kids who ride their "fixies" to trendy cafes where they down $12 craft beers.  A goal of efforts to encourage cycling and make it safer is also to protect those who, by necessity, make their livings on their bicycles.  Edwin Vicente Ajacalon was one of them.

Like most of the folks who make food deliveries on their bicycles, Ajacalon was an immigrant--in his case, from Guatemala.  He arrived in this country--specifically, to Brooklyn--a year ago.

He did not, however, live in the Brooklyn of fixed gears and craft beers:  Though he was only about eight kilometers from Hipster Hook, he lived a world away, in a single room he shared with five other men who, like him, are immigrants who delivered food by bicycle.  And the area in which he usually worked, which realtors dubbed "Park Slope South" some years back, is really still the hardscrabble working-class immigrant community it was when my mother was growing up in it.  The only differences are, of course, that the immigrants come from different places and that the neighborhood--hard by the northwestern entrance of the Greenwood Cemetery--is dirtier and shabbier, and still hasn't entirely recovered from the ravages of the 1980s Crack Epidemic.

Only one block from that entrance to the necropolis, around 5:45 pm on Saturday, Edwin Vicente Ajacalon was pedaling through the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street.  There, a BMW sedan smacked into him.



The driver, to his credit, remained at the scene (and has not been charged with any crime). Unfortunately, there probably was nothing he or anyone else could do for Edwin:  Minutes later, the police would find him lying down in a pool of blood, halfway across the block from where he was hit.  Someone checked  his vital signs and found none, which means that, although he was pronounced dead when he arrived at the hospital, he might've died as soon as the car struck him or when he struck the pavement.

All anyone could do after that was to pick up the pieces of his bicycle which, along with a sneaker and a hat, where strewn about the street.

When anyone dies so suddenly and tragically, we can lament the loved ones who will never see him again, and those whom he will never see--as well as the things he won't have the opportunity to do.  For poor Edwin, those things include celebrating his fifteenth birthday.

Yes, you read that right.  Edwin Vicente Ajacalon was 14 years old when he was struck and killed while making deliveries on his bicycle--one year after emigrating, alone, from Guatemala.  He has no family here in the US, save for an uncle with whom he briefly lived.  Like his roommates, Edwin was working other odd jobs in addition to delivering food on his bicycle--and, after paying rent, sending money to his parents in Guatemala.

So...Now we know that bicycle safety is not just a matter of protecting pampered post-pubescents.  In this case, it's about protecting the livelihood of a boy in his early teens and the parents he was trying to support.  And they can't even afford to come to the US to claim his body.