Silver-Wheeled City

An exploration of the contemporaneous birth of the safety bicycle and box camera in the 1890s in New York City, by way of 9 illustrated historical bike tours. The routes include: a run up the Hudson River Greenway following the route of Wilbur Wright on his record-making 1909 flight; a circumnavigation of Central Park while considering the epic battles to make the park legal for bikes; a cruise around the canyons of the Financial District, to see the places which figured so prominently in the "first wave" of the bicycle craze; a cruise down Broadway from midtown to Battery Park, and then across to Clear Comfort on Staten Island, following pioneer urban social photographer Alice Austen; from Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn through Prospect Park to Coney Island, on America's first dedicated cycle path; an exploration of the last springs and wells in Manhattan, from Central Park up to Inwood, thanks to photographer James Reuel Smith; an eccentric ramble from the Fulton Ferry Landing, through Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, considering the intersection of various forms of "clairvoyance" in fin de siècle Brooklyn; a cinematic odyssey from the nickelodeon Kinetoscope parlors of midtown Manhattan up across the Queensboro Bridge to Astoria to the Museum of the Moving Image; and a ferry-borne escape to the Rockaway boardwalk, Fort Tilden, and the embryonic landscape of Jamaica Bay. Illustrated with historic photographs and maps, as well as guide maps, the book aims to bring more New Yorkers and visitors onto bicycles to see the city and discover its "silver" past.