[*BCM*] New Yorker: "Holy Rollers: The City's bicycle zealots"

[Jeff Rosenblum]

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/061113fa_fact

HOLY ROLLERS
by BEN MCGRATH
The city’s bicycle zealots.
Issue of 2006-11-13
Posted 2006-11-06

In the fall of 1971, two years after the Stonewall Rebellion, sixteen 
months after Kent State, and a couple of weeks after the prison riots at 
Attica, a few hundred bicyclists rode down Fifth Avenue and on to City 
Hall, demonstrating for the institution of dedicated bike lanes and bike 
racks. They called themselves Bike for a Better City. One rider held a 
sign that read, “The internal combustion engine is antiquated, obscene, 
and responsible for more deaths thru pollution and mayhem than even that 
great curse war.” A few taxi-drivers razzed the protesters, and at one 
point an infiltrator, concerned that there were greater causes in need 
of pursuing, joined the cyclists’ ranks, shouting, “People are being 
murdered and you protest bicycle lanes!”

Since 2000, according to a certain moral calculus, more than a hundred 
and twenty New York City bicyclists have been murdered—struck dead by 
automobiles—and another twenty thousand have been injured, by enemy car 
doors and steel-fortified taxicab fenders. Three were killed in the 
course of three weeks in June of this year, including one, Dr. Carl 
Nacht, who was felled by a police tow truck while riding with his wife 
along the Hudson River Greenway—an officially sanctioned bike path. 
Since 2004, about six hundred cyclists have been arrested while 
participating in monthly political-protest rides known as Critical Mass, 
most notably during the Republican National Convention, when scores were 
ensnared in nets, and later imprisoned, and their bikes were confiscated 
as “evidence.”

New York is by no means a bicycle haven, like Copenhagen or Amsterdam, 
or even San Francisco or Madison, Wisconsin, where cycling, despite 
hilly terrain, is three times as common as it is here. But a smaller 
proportion of New York residents own automobiles compared with any large 
city in the Western world, and the local bicycling movement now includes 
more than twenty groups, with names like Right of Way, FreeWheels, and 
Revolution Rickshaws, drawing inspiration from sources as varied as the 
French Situationist philosopher Guy Debord, the civil-rights leaders 
John Lewis and Hosea Williams, and the urban sociologist Jane Jacobs. 
Their aims are at once specific (mandating bike storage at office 
buildings) and all-encompassing: Revolution Rickshaws, for instance, 
seeks in effect to create an entire pedal-based economy, offering 
“eco-responsible execution in people-moving services,” “rapid urban 
cargo transport,” and “outdoor marketing promotions,” through the use of 
pedicabs, tricycle rigs capable of carrying a thousand pounds of 
freight, and towable billboards.

Their nominal constituency, the hundred and twenty thousand New Yorkers 
who ride bicycles every day, comprises three distinct types—commuters 
(book editors, say, wearing cargo pants), exercisers (lawyers in 
spandex), and messengers (streetwise minorities without health 
care)—whose agendas overlap only loosely. And, as with any growing 
movement, success has brought about factionalization. Roughly speaking, 
the bikers range, in their political leanings, from Hugo Chávez to Ned 
Lamont, and in methodology from anarchist street theatre to wonkish 
position papers. “I think a lot of people realize that this issue is 
really central to a lot of the dilemmas facing, you know, humanity right 
now,” Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation 
Alternatives, said recently. “How are we going to deal with less oil? 
How are we going to make cities more sustainable, more livable?”

Transportation Alternatives, or T.A., represents the movement’s big 
tent, with more than five thousand members, a staff of Ivy League 
graduates, and numerous allies in city government, whom the staff 
lobbies to enact bike-friendly legislation and other traffic-reducing 
measures, like express bus service and congestion pricing. White, who is 
thirty-six, and boyishly affable, was born into a Mormon family, and 
didn’t discover the pleasures of the bike—“mankind’s greatest 
invention”—until college, in Madison. When he left for graduate school, 
in Montana, his parents, who were by then living in Illinois, shipped 
his belongings via UPS, and he rode his Cannondale touring bike fifteen 
hundred miles. He now owns four bikes, including a beater that he leaves 
on the street, attached to a lamppost or a parking meter. He has let his 
driver’s license expire.

“There’s this perception that we’re impeding the natural order of 
things,” White told me, over a beer at the bar beneath the T.A. office, 
on West Twenty-sixth Street. (His employees are forbidden from storing 
more than one bike at a time.) “It’s, like, ‘Get a car. Grow up. Men 
drive cars.’ You’re somehow a clown or a kid if you’re riding a 
bicycle.” The week before, the N.Y.P.D., in a move widely understood to 
target Critical Mass, had announced new “parade rules” requiring all 
groups of twenty or more bicyclists, or thirty-five or more pedestrians, 
to seek a permit before assembling. On cycling blogs, riders were 
trading stories of being stopped by plainclothes officers while crossing 
the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges, and charged with improbable 
offenses (in one case, for riding thirty-three m.p.h.—a pace faster than 
Lance Armstrong’s). Steve Dunleavy, the longtime Post columnist, had 
just weighed in, siding with the cops and referring to cyclists as a 
cult of “pedal punks” and “kamikaze bike bullies.” (In return, the blog 
commenters referred to Post readers as “large-vehicle driving 
meatheads,” and asked people to consider “the auto-centric character of 
their Pocono real-estate section.”)

In June, cycling advocates had lent their support to officials from the 
Department of Transportation who delivered a PowerPoint presentation to 
the largely black community board representing the neighborhoods of 
downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene, and Clinton Hill, on the merits of 
adding five miles of bike lanes through the area. The presentation met 
with resistance—one man called bikers “thugs on two wheels”—and the 
board voted not to endorse the proposal. “They see cyclists as part of 
the gentrification wave,” White said, almost apologetically. He lives in 
Park Slope.

“It’s the next big fight,” a biker who has been agitating to get cars 
permanently banned from the Central Park loop said recently. “I really 
think I’m doing God’s work.” He equated the current political moment 
with the nascent state of civil rights in the late nineteen-thirties. 
“Bicyclists are the niggers of New York,” he said.



Critical Mass, according to its participants, is not a group but a 
recurring event. “An organized coincidence,” one regular rider told me. 
“No, a disorganized coincidence—a ‘happening,’ a temporary 
reorganization of public space.” (The coincidence is international: more 
than three hundred cities on six continents experience similar events.) 
Locally, there is no acknowledged leadership, and therefore no specified 
route, much to the chagrin of the police, who, from an operational 
standpoint, at least, would prefer chaperoning to chasing. Only the date 
(the last Friday of every month), the time (7 P.M.), and the starting 
point (Union Square) are known, and although these minimal guidelines 
must have originated with a person, they have become ingrained in the 
collective cycling consciousness, like natural law. Sometimes someone 
brings a trumpet and plays a fanfare, and the assembled riders, if 
inspired, will set off in one direction or another, spreading from the 
park and into the city grid, rendering each street they enter 
momentarily impervious to through traffic. But no one wants to go first, 
and the scene in the square can begin to seem like the main event, with 
people handing out flyers and pamphlets for associated causes (“The 
Essential Truth About 9-11,” “New York’s First and Only Solar-Powered 
Film Festival”).

In the months just before the Republican Convention, the number of 
participants in Critical Mass swelled into the thousands, but fear of 
being arrested and a kind of weariness—Paul White now views the event as 
“a puerile cat-and-mouse game with the cops”—have since shrunk the bike 
brigades. On the last Friday in July, shortly after the new parade rules 
had been announced, a few hundred people converged at the north end of 
Union Square, riding all manner of bikes: recumbent, collapsible, tall, 
small. Police vans and squad cars ringed the perimeter. Norman Siegel, 
the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, was 
on hand, likening Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s new restrictions to 
the Administration’s restrictions on the rights of detainees at 
Gitmo—dual emblems, he felt, of extralegal executive power. “The bikers 
have basically thumbed their noses at the P.D.,” Siegel said. “They’re 
generally representative of New Yorkers—zany, a little rebellious, 
irreverent.” A woman wearing an American flag, and not much else, rode 
her bike slowly toward a cluster of officers, and then doubled back. 
Others passed out buttons that read, “Please Don’t Arrest Me—This is my 
permit.” On closer examination, they were recycled pins made by the 
antiwar group United for Peace and Justice, with customized paper labels 
glued over “No Blood for Oil.”

Bill DiPaola, the founder of Time’s Up, an environmental organization 
that anchors the activist, theatrical wing of the cycling community, 
glanced around warily, sizing up the anti-insurgency forces. “We’re 
definitely seeing more cars with blacked-out windows,” he said. “We 
expect the usual hard-line unfriendliness.” He added, “When I say ‘we,’ 
I mean Time’s Up.” (DiPaola is one of four people named in a suit filed 
by the city to stop Time’s Up from promoting Critical Mass rides—arguing 
that they represent an official Critical Mass governing body.) Many 
protesters had armed themselves with recording equipment. “On this 
particular ride, there’s a lot of helmet cams,” DiPaola said. “I’d say 
there’s at least thirty-five video cameras here, probably close to 
sixty-five digital cameras, at least thirty legal observers, and ten 
lawyers.” He shrugged. “You know, there’s very few people riding their 
bikes here. Most of the people are here to document this time in history.”

The only guy in the crowd wearing a necktie turned out to be a lawyer, 
named Gideon Oliver, who said that he’d defended more than a hundred 
bikers who had been arrested in the past year and a half. He doesn’t own 
a bike himself. “I’m terrified to ride in the city,” he said.

A mustachioed police inspector named John Codiglia walked toward us. “Do 
you know if Jack Black is riding in this event?” he asked. “You see the 
gentleman with the gold mask over there?” He pointed to a short guy 
wearing a red-and-black cape, right out of “Nacho Libre.” “That’s Jack 
Black! I know it’s him.”

After Codiglia walked away, Oliver said, “He’s the good cop.” He pointed 
at a dozen or so helmeted officers perched on mopeds, forming a straight 
line along the eastern edge of the park, facing in. “The guys on 
scooters are the bad cops. I know so many of them from court. That one 
over there, he accused somebody of riding his bike with a hundred other 
people, ‘perpendicular in the roadway,’ blocking traffic. And I asked 
him on the stand, ‘What’s “perpendicular” mean?’ He was, like, ‘You got 
me.’ ”

I introduced myself to the masked man and asked his name. “NYMAAN,” he 
said, pointing to his cape, which was adorned with the words “New York 
Metro Anarchist Alliance.” He added, “I am an idea, not a person.” (His 
outfit advertised a Web site that features the heading “Notes from the 
global intifada.”) He rang the bell on his handlebar a couple of times, 
and began rolling his front tire back and forth. “You know what this 
means, right? I’m starting to get itchy.”

A tall, middle-aged man with a striking blond mane approached on foot. 
“Hallelujah, the Devil!” he said, pointing at the caped biker. “I knew 
I’d meet the Devil eventually.”

“No, I’m NYMAAN,” the biker said.

The blond man was Bill Talen, a performance artist who goes by the name 
Reverend Billy and calls his congregation the Church of Stop Shopping. 
“One time, I was arrested at a Buy Nothing Day Parade,” he said, 
recalling a distant Friday evening. “We went in and exorcised a 
Starbucks cash register, and, sure enough, I got thrown in the holding 
tank at Fifty-fourth Street. And the cops that arrested me were really 
upset that they were missing this.” He opened his arms and turned, as 
though surveying his parish. “And I felt their erotic love of harassing 
the bicyclists. It was like they couldn’t date their favorite girl.”

An associate of the Reverend’s, Michael O’Neill, the manager of the 
Church of Stop Shopping, soon joined the conversation. He, too, was on 
foot. “Community isn’t recognized unless it’s mediated through monetary 
transactions,” he said. “And the idea of a leaderless community, my God, 
they don’t even speak that language. I think this is all a pretext for 
pork-barrel N.Y.P.D. expenditures.”

The sporadic jingling of bike bells gave way to a steady chime, which 
prompted the officers to start their engines, and the bicyclists began 
drifting out of the northwest corner of the park, along Seventeenth 
Street, followed by police scooters riding two by two. The 
deliberateness of the procession resembled a funeral cortege. “What this 
does, every month, every ride, every set of wheels on the road—we’re 
trying to change the values of the city,” O’Neill said.

The first bust occurred a block away, at the corner of Seventeenth and 
Fifth Avenue, where a young bearded man from Red Hook ignored a red 
light. As one of the detaining officers wrote a ticket, a blond woman 
who appeared to be in her forties observed that the cop’s scooter was 
parked in the bike lane. (Video footage later provided incontrovertible 
evidence that the cops had ridden their scooters across the sidewalk.) 
The woman was riding a child’s bike, with a yellow license plate 
attached to the rear that read, “Bicycling: A Quiet Statement Against 
Oil Wars.”

“You can go around it,” the cop said, sounding beleaguered. “You’ll fit.”

A block and a half south, the woman noticed another bike-lane 
obstruction, this time a taxi. Policing cops was becoming her thing, and 
she accosted another officer: “You’re supposed to give him a ticket.”

“What’s wrong? He’s just dropping off passengers.”

“It’s illegal to be in the bike lane,” she said.

“It’s illegal ?” he asked.

Matthew Roth, another of the Time’s Up defendants, arrived at the scene, 
walking his bike along the curb. “Did you cite it?” he asked the woman. 
“It’s 4-08, subsection E. Tell him to get out his R.C.N.Y.”—Rules of the 
City of New York. “There’s very little enforcement of traffic laws, 
because people don’t know what they are,” Roth said as he continued 
south on foot, using his palm to steady the seat of his bike. His 
knuckles bore the telltale scars of a New York City cycling career.



Tom Bernardin knows the traffic laws as well as anyone. In fact, he has 
often dreamed, while looking out his apartment window at midday, of 
sketching the intersection of Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue to 
document all the traffic violations he observes. “You know, like those 
line drawings from when you were a kid—‘Circle everything that’s wrong 
with this picture,’ ” he says. He has never encountered a Critical Mass 
rally (“I actually time my activities to avoid people as much as 
possible”), but he occasionally engages in his own kind of protest 
theatre, marching into a nearby noodle shop on Sixth Avenue to deliver 
what he calls “performance pieces,” in which he complains loudly about 
civic transgressions.

Several years ago, Bernardin, who works as a freelance tour guide, 
started an anti-noise group called FANNY (Friends Against Noisy New 
York), but lately he has concluded that the problem is intractable. 
“Noise is the bastard child of the environmental movement,” he says. His 
latest cause, which he announced in the winter, 2006, edition of the 
Greenwich Village Block Association News, is pedestrian safety, and by 
his reckoning the enemy is not S.U.V.s but Schwinns. “No doubt the most 
egregious assault on the lives of all New Yorkers in recent times is the 
relatively new phenomenon of sidewalk bicycling,” he wrote. “Remember 
the sidewalks before the Pooper Scooper law? . . . Without the mayor, 
police commissioner, and media stepping up to the plate for this 
problem, perhaps, we all had better be prepared to continue to dodge 
these louts.”

Bernardin’s rant prompted a follow-up in the spring edition, entitled 
“Back to Bikes,” with many more Village residents weighing in. 
Ostensibly, the piece was about the “problem” of bicycles, like Paul 
White’s beater, that remain locked (or “leashed”) to public street 
furniture for extended periods, cluttering the neighborhood. “Every time 
I round the corner on to Morton Street, the first thing I see is the 
bikes everywhere, rather than the tulips and daffodils,” one man complained.

But others evidently perceived Manhattan bikes as akin to hybrid cars in 
Hollywood: conspicuous presumption. “They don’t care how what they do 
affects others and you’re not going to change their attitude,” one 
resident said of bikers. “They’re morally superior because they are not 
polluting the atmosphere.”

The hierarchy of urban piety is ever delicate. Still another Villager, a 
biking enthusiast, railed against the unctuousness of the anti-bike 
pedestrians. “I’m tired of joggers using the bike path, getting in the 
way,” he said. “They tell us to get off our bikes and jog because it’s 
more environmentally sensitive. To them bikes are manufactured things. 
The metals that go into them are mined. And there’s the plastic, too . . 
. made from oil.”



“The changes in the neighborhood are really disheartening,” Bernardin 
said late one recent Friday morning, when I met him in front of his 
building for a tour of local cycling offenses. I had come prepared for a 
long walk, but Bernardin, who has a white beard and was wearing an 
untucked polo shirt, jeans, sneakers, and shades, seemed to think that 
stepping the twenty or so yards to the corner of Fourteenth Street would 
more than suffice. “I’m really aware of my environment when I’m in 
public,” he said. “Between the front of the building and the curb”—he 
was suddenly distracted by the grating jangle of a passing motorcycle 
(“That’s illegal: straight pipes”)—“is a sacred space.”

As Bernardin sees it, the Village has become an extended college campus 
for text-messaging, iPod-impaired young professionals who can’t be 
bothered to cook or say hello in the elevator and the “hellions” who 
deliver them their takeout. Both groups share a habit of defiant, 
reckless bicycling that invades the sidewalk, threatening the elderly 
and the infirm. “They’re very self-righteous, and they’re angry,” he 
said of bicyclists. “But you know what?” He jabbed his index finger 
toward the sidewalk three times in succession, and said, “This ain’t 
broken.” Then he thrust his arm out toward the street: “Fix that. ” He 
stomped and pointed once more at the sidewalk. “But don’t break this.”

Bernardin used to ride a bike, while cataloguing bishop’s-crook 
lampposts (for the Friends of Cast-Iron Architecture) and freestanding 
clock faces. (He is the founder of Save America’s Clocks, an 
organization whose motto is “Non-working clocks betray the public trust 
and send out a message that nobody’s home.”) Then, about ten years ago, 
he was riding north on Sixth Avenue, “doing everything legal,” he says, 
when another biker came tearing around the corner, “illegally,” at 
Twenty-second Street and clipped him; he spilled, and barely missed 
having his head crushed by a passing car. The incident could be a 
Rorschach for civic activists. To a cycling advocate, what’s salient is 
the fact that Bernardin was nearly killed by an automobile. Bernardin, 
however, saw two agents obeying the traffic laws—himself and the car 
driver—and a third who, by flouting them, introduced the element of danger.

“It sounds like a rattlesnake coming up behind you,” he said, as he 
scanned the intersection for bikes. “The chain: clickety-clack, 
clickety-clack. I find it so selfish. If you hook up a blood-pressure 
machine to me, you’ll see that it just spikes every time I hear that 
noise.” So far, however, he’d seen only potential victims: “See this 
person with a cane, that woman with a stroller?” At last, a violator of 
the college-grad variety buzzed past us, disrupting the sacred space. 
“Bang! This guy right here,” Bernardin said. “And here’s another—the 
chicken guy.” An Asian man on a rickety five-speed with a big basket in 
front had emerged from Dirty Bird, a restaurant on Fourteenth Street, 
and begun riding east along the sidewalk, swerving to avoid a few 
pedestrians who, judging from the upward, indecisive tilt of their 
heads, seemed to be tourists. The light turned red as the chicken guy 
reached the corner; he hadn’t worked up enough speed to hazard a 
Frogger-like crossing, so he stopped short, his front tire nearly 
brushing up against a pair of teen-age girls. Bernardin stepped forward. 
“Do you know this is illegal?” he asked.

The man looked bewildered. The light changed, and he continued east in 
the crosswalk (which is also illegal), twice looking back over his 
shoulder at Bernardin, who had already moved on and begun reminiscing 
about his activist past. “I just have to be involved, doing stuff,” he 
said. “It makes me a happier person if I’m concerned and doing things.”

But the noise was getting to him. A bike swerved, causing a truck to 
brake (screech), and Bernardin’s shoulders pinched, just as an accordion 
bus stopped to disgorge passengers (hiss—beep! beep! beep!), amid the 
usual chorus of horns and sirens. “And don’t even get me started on cell 
phones,” he said. “For me”—he turned his palms up and mimicked the 
scales of justice—“it’s bubonic plague, cell phones, bubonic plague, 
cell phones.” At that moment, a cyclist, heading south on Seventh 
Avenue, passed by with his right hand held to his ear. “Course, then you 
see the real jerks—bicycling and talking on cell phones,” Bernardin 
said. “Who’s getting satisfaction out of that conversation?”

Pedestrians are sinners, too. On occasions when Bernardin has had to 
rent a car, he has noticed that the street “turns into a funnel,” owing 
not only to the jostling of the bikes, buses, and trucks but to all the 
impatient pedestrians “testing the waters,” as he put it. “Look at these 
jerks here,” he said, gesturing at the crosswalk, where pedestrians were 
edging out into street, waiting for the light to change. “I used to do 
that when I was a kid. I’m over that. I’ve learned to be a good pedestrian.”

Across the street, the deliveryman from Dirty Bird was returning. He 
rode west, in the crosswalk, and then up onto the curb once more. 
Bernardin lit a cigarette as he contemplated confronting the 
restaurant’s management, but, after inhaling deeply, thought better of 
it. “I don’t need another enemy in the neighborhood,” he said. He tossed 
his cigarette butt in the street and said that he planned to take a 
nap—with earplugs in, and the air-conditioning turned up. It was noon, 
and he’d been awake since five, when the garbage trucks began their 
daily rounds.



After a Critical Mass ride dissipates, the most committed riders often 
reassemble at 49 East Houston Street, where Time’s Up has its 
headquarters, to compile on-the-spot video replays and add to the 
dossier of police brutality. (In May, a cyclist suffered a broken 
collarbone after a collision with the door of a police car.) Peter 
Meitzler, who is the treasurer of the New York City Pedicab Owners’ 
Association, was among the twenty-seven people who received summonses 
during the July ride. “This is kind of like the empire’s last couple of 
gasps, coming after the bikers,” he said, while standing outside Time’s 
Up, waiting for Bill DiPaola to unlock the door. “A couple of more power 
failures and I think the complete paradigm’s going to change.”

Inside, where tires hung overhead, as in a mechanic’s garage, DiPaola 
led me to the refrigerator, which was covered with Polaroids of 
suspected undercover cops who’d been known to hang around biking events, 
as well as yellowing Times clips from a multipart series on domestic 
spying. (The most recent, from December 22, 2005, cited video evidence 
of covert N.Y.P.D. infiltration at a street vigil for a deceased 
cyclist.) A young man interrupted: “Where’s the beer hidden?”

DiPaola eyed him and hesitated. “Uh, in the bathroom,” he said. When the 
young man left, DiPaola turned to a Time’s Up volunteer, Liane 
Nikitovich (nom de guerre: Nikita), who had surrounded herself with 
cameras and was attending to all the arriving documentary footage. “Who 
is that guy?” he asked.

“I invited him,” Nikita said. “He’s a videographer.”

A large television was placed on the end of a long table, and video 
footage was fed through in a continuous loop. There was the woman 
wearing the American flag—it flew up behind her like a cape as she 
picked up speed, exposing her naked back. In the East Village, riders 
were chanting in cadence, “More bikes, less cars!” Back again at a busy 
midtown intersection: one group stopped at a red light, dismounted, and 
lifted their bikes above their heads like trophies.

DiPaola was smiling, and seemed fully at ease for the first time all 
night. “You see the look on the cops’ faces when people on the sidewalks 
cheer us?” he said. “They hate it.”



Studies have shown that the surest way to make biking safer is to make 
it more popular—to increase visibility and awareness among motorists. 
(“You’re like the Invisible Man out there,” a biker told me.) To make it 
popular, it must be seen as fun. But riding in heavy traffic, while 
obeying all lights and signs, is not fun.

Paul White has been working on a cyclists’ code of ethics for the 
members of Transportation Alternatives to sign, and, although he’s 
sensitive to complaints about scofflaw cyclists, he’s been very careful 
about the wording. “It doesn’t say, ‘Stop at all red lights,’ ” he said. 
“Really, the heart of it is yielding to pedestrians. That’s a 
low-hanging fruit for us. They’re getting around under their own power, 
just like you.” He took a sip of beer. “Sure, they jaywalk. Sure, 
they’re oblivious sometimes. But, you know, give them a break.”

Of course, some people’s fun is another person’s nightmare. The 
completion of the thirteen-mile greenway along the Hudson has inspired a 
great many people—five thousand, on a good day—to ride their bikes. 
According to Michael Smith, a veteran city cyclist, the new riders tend 
to wear spandex and helmets and go very fast, with a great sense of 
purpose, on expensive machines. Smith is a member of Right of Way, an 
organization “dedicated to the overthrow of car tyranny.” On its Web 
site, he wrote, “Back when we were all fighting the cars on the street, 
I felt a certain sense of solidarity. But now that we’ve got this 
dedicated—or sorta dedicated—space, I’m finding out that a lot of us 
are, well, assholes . . . just like that Guido in the S.U.V. who nearly 
killed you on Sixth Avenue last week.” Smith longed for a return of that 
“good, mutinous urban attitude” about cycling, where “we’d just laugh at 
the stoplights, and give the finger to the indignant, honking drivers. 
And we’d all feel like comrades or co-conspirators or something.” The 
“drivers on bikes,” as he called them, are really suburbanites in 
disguise. “Will they—please God!—move to fucking Scarsdale as soon as 
their kids are born?”

A few weeks ago, local bike-shop proprietors began noticing an uptick in 
flat tires, and it emerged that vandals, evidently sharing Smith’s 
feelings about the would-be suburban speedsters, had been placing carpet 
tacks, like I.E.D.s, along the greenway between 137th Street and the 
George Washington Bridge.

Meanwhile, the Police Department, after withdrawing its initial parade 
restrictions in the face of public opposition, has announced a revised 
proposal that is not substantially different. (Transportation 
Alternatives sent out an e-mail bulletin to its members, contending that 
the department is “just playing with numbers.”) A hearing has been set 
for November 27th, and cyclists, under the auspices of the Assemble for 
Rights Coalition, are planning a group ride from Union Square to One 
Police Plaza.



Not long ago, Tom Bernardin went to see his old friend Margot Gayle, to 
whom he paid tribute in “The Ellis Island Immigrant Cookbook,” which he 
self-published in 1991, and in whose honor he defends the sidewalk. 
Gayle, at ninety-eight, is the last of the original preservationists; 
she helped bail Jane Jacobs out of jail, and led the fight to save the 
Jefferson Market Courthouse from demolition, putting together a 
committee that included E. E. Cummings and Lewis Mumford. For many 
years, she lived on West Ninth Street. She would walk a mile a day, 
dodging bikers and skateboarders and rollerbladers. (“She’d shake her 
cane at them,” Bernardin told me.) Now mostly deaf and confined to a 
wheelchair, Gayle has made a few concessions to the gentrified, 
Bloombergian city: she lives in a high-rise apartment building on the 
Upper East Side and visits Starbucks every day.

Bernardin arrived carrying a bouquet of flowers. The walls of the 
apartment were covered with plaques and tributes: “Intractable Foe of 
Vandals and Rapacious Developers,” “In Recognition of Successful 
Advocacy for Preservation,” a framed letter from Bill Clinton.

“Do you still ride your bicycle?” she asked him.

“No, I was hit,” he said. “I was on my bicycle, and another bicycle hit 
me and it knocked me down.”

She reflected on her younger days, when she, too, was a rider. “They 
were very useful, and people enjoyed their bicycles very much,” she 
said. “But too many automobiles—it’s dangerous now.”

Bernardin said that he thought the ramped indentations in the curb at 
corners were to blame. Gayle couldn’t make out what he was saying, so he 
wrote it on an index card: “I think curb cuts are the problem.”

She looked alarmed. “You do? Why?”

He made a wavy gesture with his hand, and said, “They go right up on the 
sidewalk.”

“But of course I like them, being in a wheelchair.”

“Well, that’s why they’re there,” he conceded. “That’s the good part of 
them.” (Sidewalk bicycling—the bane of the elderly and disabled—did not 
become epidemic until the passage of the Americans with Disabilities 
Act, in 1990.)

Gayle complained some more about automobile traffic: “It spoils the air 
and endangers pedestrians and people with baby carriages.” They talked 
about Washington Square Park (“It’s all N.Y.U.—they just want it for 
themselves,” Bernardin said), and about the Yorkville clock, nearby, 
which Gayle had helped Bernardin restore. “I’m worried about that clock 
now,” she said. “They’re building a big building a block away—excavating.”

Bernardin promised to check on it. As he was leaving, she handed him two 
postcards to mail on his way out. One read, “Save the Graving Dock,” and 
featured a picture of a dormant shipyard in Red Hook. The other called 
for preservation of the former Domino sugar refinery in Williamsburg.

“She is the role model of all time,” Bernardin said in the elevator. 
“She never took a cab.”