On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City

On Bicycles:
A 200-year History of Cycling in New York City
By Evan Friss
Columbia University Press
256 pages

Today on Gotham, Kara Schlichting, Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY, speaks with Evan Friss, Associate Professor of History at James Madison University, about his new book, On Bicycles. The book provides the first major history of the key figures and episodes in New York City’s 200-year history of cycling.

In Friss’s very capable telling, this history offers a unique window onto the nature of transportation, recreation, and public space in urban America. Cars and pedestrians have had specific designations on city streets in the U.S. The bicycle is a different story. For two centuries now, New Yorkers have tried to define and redefine the relationship between the built environment and its people via the bicycle — with a diverse set of actors rising in each period to integrate the velocipede into the urban fabric, or ban it altogether. On Bicycles explores these key moments and figures.