Bike Snob - Anonymous [6]
Well, it turns out that the roads they rode are still there, in addition to a bunch of newer roads. Not only that, but there are also a bunch of new buildings and people and cars there as well. As such, it would seem to be that the history of our cycling ancestors is buried under all this new development—until you learn that this development is actually cycling’s legacy and as much a part of its history as the penny-farthing.
In the late 1800s, where there were macadam roads there were cyclists. And where there were enough cyclists businesses would spring up, and soon there were new towns. Eventually, these towns became the suburbs. For example, everybody’s heard of Queens and Long Island. Queens is a borough of New York City, and it sits on the Long Island landmass, which has a population of 7.5 million people and in many ways is the prototypical modern suburb. But in 1895 Queens hadn’t yet become incorporated into New York City, and most of Long Island was farmland. One thing they did have, though, was a macadam road. It was called Merrick Road. In fact, it’s still called Merrick Road (or Merrick Boulevard, or West Merrick Road, depending on where you are). Various expressways have superseded it in terms of importance, but it’s still a major artery in eastern Queens and Long Island.
In search of cycling’s past, I put on my tweed reading suit and immersed myself in the “Gossip of the Cyclers,” and learned that back in the 1890s, Merrick Road was the place to be on a bicycle. It had a national reputation. Riders used it for pleasure and for competition. Century rides followed it to eastern Long Island. Races took place there, and records were set. One of cycling’s earliest sporting heroes was Charles “Mile a Minute” Murphy, so named not because he talked a lot, but because he was the first person to ride a bicycle for a mile in under a minute. He accomplished this feat not far from Merrick Road, and he set his record on a specially constructed board track while drafting behind a Long Island Rail Road train on June 30, 1899.
So for cycling, Long Island’s Merrick Road was like the Bonneville Salt Flats and Daytona Beach combined. It was so popular that people built hotels and businesses for all the cyclists who would visit from the city. It turns out that the town of Valley Stream in Nassau County on the border of Queens was built to service the throngs of cyclists that would come to Merrick Road every weekend. Cycling actually created Valley Stream in the same way that gambling created Las Vegas. Granted, Valley Stream ain’t exactly Vegas (though that’s probably a good thing), nor is it even remotely a cycling paradise today, but it’s still a big deal. Anything that creates a whole town is culturally significant. Bikes built towns like cars, trains, rivers, and mills did. You’re not going to find any towns that were created by Rollerblades.
Not only had I discovered a town that was built by bicycles, but it just so happens that I grew up pretty much right next-door to that town, on what is now the New York City line, in the eastern end of the Rockaway peninsula, which, it turns out, was itself a cycling hotbed back in the Mauve Decade. See, for New Yorkers back then, Far Rockaway was what the Hamptons are now; it was the hot beach spot, and Valley Stream was the hot cycling spot. I never would have guessed that the streets of my youth, trod by Jews walking to shul on Saturday and strafed by jetliners landing at nearby Kennedy Airport, were actually in the middle of a Malachi Crunch of hipness and cultural relevance back in the 1890s. In a way this is like being fascinated with Mark Twain, devoting your life to him, and then discovering that, by pure coincidence, you grew up across the street from the house in which he was born.
Armed with my new knowledge of my old neighborhood and