Bike Snob - Anonymous [10]
After a brief stop in a coffee shop during which a customer told me I looked like I was going skiing despite my utter lack of skis, ski equipment, or ski attire, I continued down Broadway. The sights grew increasingly familiar, but until this day I’d never had any idea that at one time this street was teeming with the very first cyclists. It was eerie. I mean, besides the fact that there’s a bike shop on Broadway in Woodmere where I used to smudge the glass case with my nose while gazing lovingly at Hutch stems I couldn’t afford, there’s absolutely no sign of its cycling history. There are plenty of other places today that maintain their cycling heritage, but the Rockaway peninsula is not one of them. Yet I’d become a cyclist anyway. In growing up here, had I absorbed it unknowingly? Had I somehow been informed by these mustachioed, pantalooned ghosts?
As you travel through the Five Towns the streets grow quieter and leafier, and the houses are more rambling. Of all the neighborhoods through which you pass on the 1895 Rockaway Run, the Five Towns are the ones in which it’s easiest to imagine what things might have been like back then. And if the City of Greater New York had not been created in 1898 and the city line had not arbitrarily been dropped between Far Rockaway and Lawrence like a gigantic page break in the MS Word document that is Long Island, this feeling would continue right through to my final destination, which was Far Rockaway:
Here ample hotel accommodation is offered, and a good dinner to be had. The attractions of the place are well known. Surf or quiet water bathing can be enjoyed at the option of the rider.
Yes, back then Far Rockaway was the place to be:
FAR ROCKAWAY’S BREEZES.
Never a Dull Day or Evening at This Popular Resort
Far Rockaway, L.I. July 21.—For cool breezes, pretty girls, and general attractions this place stands in the front rank of Long Island resorts. Never a dull day and never a dull evening is the record at Far Rockaway. Social affairs come around with clock-like regularity, and one follows so close upon the other that the Summer visitors have barely time to catch their breath after one social round before the hour for another one is at hand. Life at the hotels and boarding houses is everything that could be desired during the heated term. Surf and still-water bathing, driving, and pleasant gatherings on the broad verandas are popular forms of recreation…
Once it became the eastern extremity of New York City and politically separate from the town of Hempstead, Far Rockaway slowly began to wither. There are no hotel accommodations anymore, and “good dinner” is relative. The last article I read in the New York Times about Far Rockaway was from January 27, 2008, and the headline was “Beaten Down, and Not Only by Nature.” It’s still beautiful, though. My ride was over, and I’d wound up right where I started.
The Beginning of the End of the Beginning
Cycling’s first boom began to subside once automobiles improved and became more affordable. In 1909, police were setting speed traps on Merrick Road for “scorchers” in automobiles. For a while, the bicycle was just a quaint relic, and instead of reporting the “Gossip of the Cyclers” the New York Times was reporting on cycling’s death, which they attributed to the fact that it “always involved more or less hard work, more or less of the discomforts of the road, and always the limitation of the rider.” Not only that, but unlike the car the bicycle “did not admit of discrimination whereby the love of display, the superiority purchasable by money, or the essential comfort of the individual could be expressed.” In other words, too much work, not enough flash.
Of course, this turned out to be totally wrong. Cycling’s popularity might have waned temporarily while