I occasionally ride to, or through, Flushing Meadow Park. If you've never been there (or haven't read my posts about it), you might recognize at least one of its landmarks: the Unisphere, built for the 1964-65 World's Fair and featured in Men In Black as well as other movies and TV shows.
What you also might not know is that, like Prospect and Central Parks, it surrounds an artificial lake. During the summer, those lakes are popular for, among other things, boat rides.
Flushing Meadow, however, offers a type of water craft not available in the other city playgrounds: pedal boats. While they bear more resemblance to oversized beach toys than to boats or bicycles, they are propelled in the same way as your bicycle: Your feet spin the pedals.
I haven't tried one, but I plan to, if for no other reason than to see whether the experience is more like cycling or boating--or neither.
Perhaps these young women could have offered some insight:
For ten cents, had the opportunity pedal across the waters of Lake Lucerne, near Seattle, Washington. Their pedal boat literally combined two bicycles with a boat (or, more precisely, a raft) made of milled timbers. The women's leg power propels the contraption forward by means of a water wheel attached to the bicycle gears.
It's pretty clever, if you ask me. If only the resort's managers could have had such acumen: In December 1934, four months after the photo was taken, the property (which included 98 acres of land in addition to 16 acres of lake) was seized and sold at a U.S. Marshal's auction to satisfy a $22,763 court judgment.
As far as I know, there haven't been any pedal boats on the lake since then.
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