New Book Gives Cyclists A Ride Through NYC's Biking Past

NEW YORK — The tourists snapping selfies on the Brooklyn Bridge and the cyclists crossing it may seem like natural opponents. But there was a time in New York City's history when the bicycle and the camera went hand-in-hand, according to historian Kevin Dann.

When they burst onto the marketplace in the late 19th century, Dann said, the newly invented cameras let New Yorkers see their city through a new lens and empowered them to document scenes far beyond their blocks.

"Photography exploded because before the automobile came along people’s reach, their geographic reach, was magnified extensively," said Dann, 63, of Prospect Heights. "And so you had all sorts of scientific, pedagogical and artistic — every avenue of human culture, especially here in New York City, which is a cultural mega-machine, all of a sudden the bicycle and the camera teamed up and went everywhere."

The former SUNY Plattsburgh professor and current bicycle tour guide explores that relationship — and invites the city's cyclists to take picturesque journies of their own — in his latest book.

"Silver-Wheeled City," which went on sale Friday, lays out nine bike trips that aim to give riders a glimpse of the Big Apple in the 1890s and early 1900s, when "the bicycle and the camera teamed up and went everywhere," according to Dann.

Illustrated with 30 to 40 historic images, the book lets cyclists visit the city's first dedicated bicycle path down what is now Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn and Wilbur Wright's landmark 1909 flight over the Hudson River. Other routes wind through the Financial District and down the Rockaway boardwalk to Fort Tilden.

Dann said he hopes the book will inspire more New Yorkers to traverse the city by bike and compare today's landscape to the old images.

"By bicycling you cross boundaries, and what is New York City except an incredibly fluid place where the boundaries are broken down in a way that they aren’t in the rest of America and in the rest of the world, so that you have the most attractive, fertile cultural situation on the planet?" Dann said. "And the bicycle is the perfectly made tool to work with that."

Cyclists who follow Dann's routes will be a part of what he calls a "bicycle renaissance" in the city. Some 490,000 daily cycling trips were recorded here in 2017, more than double the 210,000 seen in 2007, and the number of New Yorkers who commute by bike has increased nearly twice as fast as other major cities, a city Department of Transportation report shows.

But the city's first bicycle craze allowed the early photographers Alice Austen and James Reuel Smith to capture scenes that would have otherwise been out of reach, according to Dann. Two of the bike rides in his book retrace their steps.

Staten Island-bred Austen photographed characters on the city's streets, while Smith documented the city's last springs and wells in Manhattan and The Bronx. "They only could do what they did because of the bicycle," Dann said.

"The camera and the cellphone as the camera has turned into an instrument to lull people to sleep," Dann said. "Early on, it was a machine for discovery, and it liberated people into a new consciousness as they entered the 20th century."

Dann believes that bicycling can shake people out of the "slumber" into which their phones have lulled them. He said he has led more than 10,000 people on bike tours through the city in recent years, and he plans to bring people along on the routes in his book.

"There are a million stories and a million things to be discovered out there on (a) bicycle that I haven’t ... because other people will bring their attention and they will have a different experience," Dann said.