Bike Snob - Anonymous [5]
Already a number of plans sent in and others devised by himself and his assistants are in Mr. Martin’s office, awaiting a selection. The plan that at present meets the Superintendent’s approval provides for the construction of a narrow roadway on the trestle through which the bridge cars pass. This is a little over twelve feet wide, ample room for wheelmen. When the trestle ends the path will be continued on the same level to a point near the terminal structures, to be joined at each end. At the junctions elevators will be put in to afford communication with the street level. Another plan of considerable merit, but which has also points of disadvantage, provides for a strip, say four or six feet wide, built out from the bridge structure proper, where the cable and trestle work ends. By this plan the cyclist must take to the roadway, and thus it will be seen that the plan is not wholly satisfactory.
And cyclists were demanding better conditions, as they still are today. The Brooklyn Bridge had only been opened in 1883 and was still the longest suspension bridge in the world; already, cyclists were demanding a bike lane on it.
As a cyclist it’s surprising to me that a paper like the New York Times would publish the results of club races, but that’s how popular it was. After all, I’m a club racer, and unless one of my teammates wins I don’t even know the results of the races I’m in—I just roll across the line towards the back of the pack and use the last of my strength to propel myself to the nearest coffee shop. If I happen to get curious about who won, I just ask around later. But back then they covered cycling obsessively, and “Gossip of the Cyclers” was like a hybrid of the sports pages and the wedding announcements. Cycling was important to people.
So many people were riding that cycling soon began to influence the urban environment. In order to ride, cyclists needed good roads. And back then, there just weren’t that many of them. Cars still looked like motorized apple carts (what few there were—Carl Benz sold something like twenty-five cars between 1880 and 1893), and people still used horses to get around. So the best roads riders could hope for were “macadam” roads (a type of road construction pioneered by the Scotsman John Loudon McAdam around 1820). In those days, macadamized roads were to cyclists what gold was to the frontiersmen—cyclists would literally go to the ends of the earth to get their hands (or, more accurately, tires) on them. Once word of a new macadam road was out, cyclists would organize a “run” or a “century” and hit it in the same way the skateboarders of the 1970s in Southern California used to converge on empty pools.
Rocking a “Run” to Rockaway
In Search of My Two-Wheeled Ancestors
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
—Ernest Hemingway
It’s one thing to learn that something you love was big over a hundred years ago. It’s something else entirely to actually see that for yourself, and to learn what cycling and cyclists were like back then. Until some big bike company like Trek starts