I had just pedaled up the ramp on the Manhattan side of the Queensborough (a.k.a 59th Street) Bridge. Two men and a woman, abreast each other, spread themselves across the pedestrian side and into the side marked for bikes of the bike/pedestrian lane. One of the men was stretching and craning his neck to snap photos of the city's skyline and the Roosevelt Island finiculaire; the other man and the woman were neither doing nor paying attention to anything in particular.
As I had pedaled up the ramp from a dead stop at the bottom (courtesy of a man who was texting somebody and crossed into my path), I was riding slowly. From the opposite direction, three young-looking, lycra-clad young men pedalled and spun at a much faster speed. Still, I figured I had enough time and space to pedal around the photographer and his friends and that, by the time the three young cyclists were ready to ride around them, I would be well past the midpoint of the bridge.
My highly unscientific calculations proved to be entirely correct. I was well past the photographer and his friends when the young male cyclists rode around them. And I probably never would have thought about them, or the photographer and his mates, again.
But then I heard the thumping, clanging and clattering of metal and human flesh colliding as if sucked into a vortex or carbon fiber. The cyclists were a few wheel lengths past the photographer and his travelling companions, but I don't think they had anything to do with the pileup. To their credit, the male friend helped the cyclists--who didn't seem to be hurt--up. I did a U-turn (fortunately, no other cyclists were approaching from either direction) and went to see whether the cyclists needed any help. Two declined, and thanked me for my offer. But the other, upon seeing that his bike was wrecked (It was carbon fiber.), punched and kicked the fence on the side of the bridge, picked up his bike and flung it. I got out of his way.
The bridge's lane is just barely wide enough for a couple of pedestrians walking abreast and a cyclist riding alone or in single file. Plus, parts of the paving have been torn away (It's supposed to be re-paved), leaving half the width of the lane unusable for a significant part of the path's length. That, at a time when more people are walking and pedaling across the bridge than perhaps at any time in its history.
Twenty-five years ago this summer, cyclists in New York City staged a rebellion.
In a way, that such a thing would take place in the august days of the Reagan Administration seems ironic. Then again ACT UP held its first demonstrations that year, and the following year,a riot in Tompkins Square Park rocked the city.
The difference between those demonstrations and the ones cyclists staged during the summer of 1987 is that the latter seemed, on its face, even more improbable than the other two. By the time ACT UP first met, large numbers of gay men had organized, politically and socially, in response to the AIDS epidemic, which would wipe out whole blocks of San Francisco and downtown Manhattan. Meanwhile, residents of the neighborhood around the park agreed that the park had become a de facto homeless shelter and a haven for drug dealers, vagrants and loud musicians who had no other venue. Those residents were deeply divided over what had to be done. But after the city instuted a 1 am curfew, nearly everyone agreed that officers of the NYPD's Ninth Precinct routinely overstepped their boundaries and, in some cases, committed outright assault and battery.
In contrast, cyclists in New York were scarcely organized at all, save for whatever club affiliations they may have had. Least organized of all were the bike messengers, who were an even larger presence on the city's streets than they are now. As great as their numbers were, they had absolutely no political clout because nearly all of them were poor (as I was, several years earlier, when I turned to that line of work) and some were homeless. It wasn't a job for the hipster-equivalents of that time; rather, as one of my colleagues in that business said, we were "the rejects of society," whether or not through our own doing.
Why am I mentioning that? Well, the impetus for that summer's demonstrations was an action then-Mayor Edward Koch (after whom the Queensborough Bridge is now named) aimed squarely at the messengers. On 22 July of that year, Hizzoner stood on the steps of City Hall to announce a ban on bicycling in an area of Midtown bounded by 59th and 31st Streets, on the north and south, respectively, and by Park and Fifth Avenues on the east and west. The ban would take effect six weeks later, in early September, after the signs had been posted and legal niceties dispensed with.
What is truly remarkable is that cyclists who weren't messengers--and people who weren't cyclists at all--actually expressed outrage at the proposed ban. New York cyclists who weren't messengers weren't nearly as numerous or diverse in those days; to see as many of them unite with messengers--with whom they had almost nothing in common aside from the fact that they pedaled astride two wheels--caused even media outlets like the New York Post, which did much to foment anti-bike hysteria, to take notice,and even to portray messengers' routes as "the sweatshops of the street."
For the next few weeks, hundreds of cyclists--I was among them on a couple of occasions--gathered at around 5:30 pm (just after most messengers' workdays ended, spread across Sixth Avenue and paraded from Houston Street to Central Park, a distance of about three miles. We pedaled at a snails' pace--about five mph (eight kph) so that passerby could look at us and walkers, joggers and runners could join us. We stopped at red lights and let pedestrians cross in front of us, which showed that we were "friendly" and prevented the police from using the pretext of "blocking traffic" to bust our permit-less rides.
During that long, hot summer, there were other actions, such as the time when cyclists wended through the East 40s and 50s on foot to show how the ban could lead to pedestrian gridlock. It had another effect: It mixed gritty messengers with, not only other kinds of cyclists, but with executives in bespoke suits on their way to lunch meetings in posh restaurants. This increased understanding of, if not sympathy for, cyclists: While tension between messengers and cabdrivers has never entirely abated, at least they started to see each other as fellow "working stiffs", which helped to create support for safer conditions for cyclists and better working conditions for messengers.
I can't help but to think that the contact between cyclists and non-cyclists led to public denunciations of the ban, which the New York State Supreme Court invalidated on a technicality (The city hadn't published official notice.) for an additional 45 days. That meant the ban couldn't take effect until mid-October. At that point, Mayor Koch, who prided himself on his taste for a good fight, threw in the towel.
It will be interesting to see what future historians and biographers say (if, indeed, they say anything at all) about this episode of the Koch regime--and cycling in New York City. A bas l'interdiction!
Sometimes I'm thankful for small things.
No, this post won't be about cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels, although those things are quite nice. Instead, I'm going to show you something that, I hope, will make one of my rides a bit safer and more pleasant.
I frequently cycle the promenade by the World's Fair Marina, which rims Flushing Bay to the north and east of LaGuardia Airport for about a mile and a quarter. Until recently, the lane ended rather abruptly at an especially apocalyptic-looking yard that seemed to serve mainly as a parking lot for New York City Department of Transportation trucks. There, the lane turned into a dirt path that looked--and, when you rode on it, felt--like the Ho Chi Minh trail if it had been on the moon. That is, if you were lucky. If you weren't, you had to dodge whatever parts the trucks dropped or a hose some cement-mixing company left behind.
Well, the dirt path has been cleaned up, and a concrete sidewalk built on it. That has improved access to the Northern Boulevard Bridge, which you must cross if you want to continue into Eastern Queens. But, as nice as the sidewalk/lane extension is, it still has one problem: It leaves you at an entrance ramp for the Grand Central Parkway.
Sometimes there isn't much traffic, but at other times, especially on game days (It's near Citi Field), it can be all but impossible to cross. The worst part, though, is that the point at which you cross is at the end of a curve in the ramp. So, while you may not see any cars or trucks coming, they could come zooming from the other side of the turn.
I don't know whether the Department of Transportation plans to install signs or a signal at the crossing--or, for that matter, how much good such things would actually do. From what I've seen, not many cyclists or pedestrians have been using the bridge. However, I can't help but to think that it has had to do with the perilous crossing, the until-now-poor condition of the access lane and the narrowness of the bike/pedestrian lane on the bridge.
Well, at least one part of the trip has improved. Perhaps there is hope for the rest.
