A Discount, Because "They're Owed"

 When Willie Mays played stickball with the boys in his neighborhood--Harlem--the media spun it as a story about his love of kids, and how they loved him.

While they certainly had affection for each other, the real reason "The Say Hey Kid" was hitting and catching what those kids hit and threw wasn't that the Polo Grounds, then the Giants' home field, was only a few blocks away.

Rather, he was on those upper Manhattan streets because, even with all his celebrity, he couldn't live anywhere else:  Realtors in other neighborhoods, or other towns, wouldn't rent or sell to him, not because they were Brooklyn Dodger fans, but  because he's black.

Although New York didn't have Jim Crow laws, there was nothing to stop them  from such practices--or to charge a black buyer more than they'd charge a white client.

While it's not possible to change the past, some people are trying, in the ways they know how, to make amends.  Grant Petersen, president and founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works, is one such person.

He's offering "reparations pricing" on some of the company's bikes and frames.  In a way, it's a revival of a practice Rivendell engaged in for two years until the COVID epidemic:  Black customers were offered discount for purchases in the company's Walnut Creek, CA store.  Starting on Monday, 12 October, that discount will be offered on select bikes, nationwide.

Petersen's response to those who object that some customers will "pretend to be black" is, in essence, "I don't care."  He's offering the discount to Black customers, he says, "not because it's a nice thing to do" but because "they're owed."

I'm not surprised that he's getting backlash about this:  Some folks believe that others "deserve" similar discounts for all sorts of reasons, such as being first responders.  I don't disagree with them, but Petersen says that he's trying to keep things "simple."  How simple it will be to identify Black customers, I don't know.  But I respect him for trying to achieve some measure of justice in some segment of the world.

I Should Be Happy For This, But...

This is what I see, now, outside my window. 

It's an urban millennial's dream.  I'm supposed to be happy. 

I'm not the only one who isn't--and not only because I'm not a millennial.  Some of my neighbors hate it. I can't say I blame them, even if their reasons are very different from mine.

A few weeks ago, the Crescent Street bike lane "opened for business," if you will.  On paper, it sounds like something every cyclist in northwestern Queens (and, probably, other parts of this city) dreamed of:  a direct bike route from the Robert F. Kennedy to the Ed Koch (or Triborough to 59th Street, to old-time New Yorkers) Bridges.  

Now, if I were still riding to the college every day, or I were still working in Midtown or Downtown Manhattan, I might have welcomed the lane--had it taken a different route and been constructed differently.

One common complaint was that drivers on Crescent routinely exceeded the speed limit by a lot.  It's not hard to see why:  This stretch of Crescent is a long straightway not unlike some race tracks.  And, as I mentioned, it connects the two bridges--as well as the Grand Central Parkway (which goes to the airports) to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and, in effect, four of the city's five boroughs.  That is one reason it was so much used by taxi and car-service drivers, many of whose "home" offices and garages are near the RFK Bridge.

Even so, I didn't mind riding on Crescent:  Because the street sliced through the neighborhood like an exclamation point, and I knew the drivers' habits, traffic was predictable.  Plus, the drivers who regularly used Crescent knew that the neighborhood is residential and  we--cyclists and pedestrians--also used the street.

But now there's only one traffic lane, so drivers can't maneuver--and become very short-tempered and resentful, sometimes endangering cyclists out of spite. Worse, they can't see you behind the row of parked cars.  These are  real problems when taxis, livery cars and other "work" vehicles pull into the lane to discharge or pick up passengers, as they often do by the hospital.  If you're riding down from the RFK bridge, and you don't run into red lights, it's easy to build up speed. When an ambulance or truck pulls into the lane, you have no choice but to take a hard right into the traffic lane--or to end up in back of the ambulance!

One more thing:  When cars parked along the curb, where the lane is now, they served as a buffer between traffic (bicycle and motor) and pedestrians crossing the street. Even if a careless pedestrian wandered, mid-block, into traffic, he or she had to cross through the parked cars.  Now, those same pedestrians step directly into the bike lane as they're looking at their screens, oblivious to their surroundings.  

Some of my neighbors would love to see the lane removed.  I agree with them, almost.  They complain that it's less convenient, or even "impossible" to park.  To me, it's more dangerous--for me, for them and for pedestrians.  The Crescent Street lane, I believe, would be better on another street:  one that parallels Crescent (28th or 30th come to mind) from the RFK Bridge to Queensborough Plaza, where it's easy to access the Ed Koch Bridge.

 

Garrett Lai, R.I.P.

His desk was a yard sale of books, magazines, bike parts, assorted sheets of paper, journals and probably at least one classified Pentagon report.  

No, that's not a description of my work space though, at times, it would have come close to being one.  Rather, it's how "Padraig" of The Cycling Independent recalled his friend and onetime colleague Garrett Lai.

If that name sounds familiar, you probably were reading Bicycling! and Bicycle Guide during the 1990s and early 2000s, when he was an editor at each of those publications.  Or, a few years earlier, you might've been perusing copies of Road and Track magazine.  You may also have been one of the world's more arcane subcultures (this, coming from someone--yours truly--who's spent time in the academic world):  the California community of vintage typewriter enthusiasts.

(Garrett Lai, left, with Yeti Cycles co-founder John Parker)

I was unaware of that last group of people until today.  But it makes perfect sense that Garrett Lai was part of it:  He was all about anything mechanical and anything that could be expressed in, or used to communicate, words.  A self-described "failed engineer" who could make the most technical details comprehensible, and even readable (much like the much-missed Jobst Brandt and Frank Berto), Lai had, in Padraig's words, "more sides than a round-cut diamond."

But he passed away, at age 54, last week.  The coroner is still determining his cause of death.