All the Rage: The Hidden History of the Cycling City

Over the course of history, countless vehicles have moved across our city. But it is the bicycle that has had the longest running claim to New York’s streets: 200 years and counting. This is the story of how that happened. Of how bicycles came and went and came back againPedal back with LW! and history professor Evan Friss to 1890s NYC. With the wind in our hair (no helmets back then) and skirts (or bloomers) billowing, we’ll explore how the relationship between the city, its people, and their bicycles evolved. How neighborhoods like the Upper West Side came to reflect the bicycles and bicyclists who occupied it. And the remarkable extent to which the bicycle penetrated so many aspects of daily life during the bicycle craze of the 1890s.

For an hour we’ll forget subways, Ubers, and taxis. No need to feed this steed. We’ll wobble and weave together as Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of bicycles—and bicyclists—in New York City and unearths the hidden history of the cycling city.