WHERE HISTORY MEETS THE ROAD: 45 YEARS OF FAMILIAR ROUTES

by Sam Slaton, Former Communications & Marketing Director

Many cyclists are creatures of what appears, from a certain vantage point, to be habit—they ride the same route to and from home, office, café, or park. They clip in first on the same side every time, keep their tires pumped to a familiar PSI, drink from a well-loved water bottle (likely in need of a serious wash), eat the same snacks, and dismount at ride’s-end with a form as predictable as an automaton. But these habits belie these cyclists’ true nature. Keeping so much the same, they become connoisseurs of change, as keenly attuned as a meteorologist to subtle shifts in the weather, sensitive as an Old Dutch Master to the fine gradations of angles of light in different seasons, intimately familiar as a naturalist with the countless trees along their route in various stages of leaf and flower, discerning as an epicure when savoring half a leftover Clif Bar discovered on the precipice of bonking, and celebratory as Shakespeare of the world’s stage, thronged by countless passers-by and fellow riders, all to the soundtrack of the never-not-new thrum of one’s own heart when the going gets tough. Who among this class of riders, when cycling through a thriving city, has not thought something similar to Miranda near the end of The Tempest: “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / that has such people in’t!” Her father, Prospero, replies, perhaps a bit condescendingly, “‘Tis new to thee.” But anyone who’s ridden the same route more than once can understand

Miranda’s enthusiasm. There is something about being on a bike that remakes the world—and oneself—anew.

2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that you can’t step in the same river twice. Likewise, you can’t go on the same bike ride twice. Though the route and a million other variables may stay the same, everything else has changed: light, weather, the ache in your knee, the ache in your heart, the friend by your side, the friend who couldn’t come this time…

It’s in the same spirit that I re-enter the history of the TD Five Boro Bike Tour, about which I’ve written several times—first in 2013 when we launched the new bike. nyc website, again in 2017 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Tour, and last year for a profile about Steve Bauman, the father of the Tour. Since that first time a decade ago, it can feel like everything really has changed, and not always for the better: the closing of famed punk venue CBGB in Manhattan’s East Village, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian war on Ukraine, the untimely passing of our dear friend and former Bike New York events manager Beth Heyde. But amidst these tragedies, there has been extraordinary beauty: reconnecting with loved ones over Zoom for quarantinis and long-distance board games, countless stories of Ukrainian refugees welcomed with open arms and homes in neighboring countries, the birth of Beth’s daughter, a ginger like her mom, just a few months before Beth died.

And of course, there have been the bike rides—you rode in the snow and rain with a headwind, in the sun with a tailwind. You rode uphill both ways. You screamed with exhilaration as the terror of a steep descent melted into euphoria when you realized at the bottom, I made it! You rode to wake up and to wind down. You rode because you were happy and you rode to get happy. You rode to remember and you rode to forget. You rode old routes and new ones that would one day become as familiar as if they were traced on your skin. You rode with old friends and made new ones along the way. You rode alone, but of course you’re never really alone on a bike: a ride has a way of putting you into conversation with your selves— past, present, and future. And now you’re here, ready to ride again. Maybe it’s your first time to ride the Tour. Maybe it’s your 45th. Regardless, this 45th Tour is the only one like it—with the weather we’ll all remember as unique to May 7th, 2023 in New York City, with the diegetic soundtrack you’ll hear spilling out of a bodega as you round a corner in the Bronx (probably something by Ice Spice), the smiles you’ll see in passing and the ones that will spread across your face time and time again over 40 miles…

These moments and many more will become a part of your history. And when you ride this year, you will also be participating in the history of New York City since the Tour was founded in 1977—all the life, strife, construction, destruction, and flow of humanity that makes this the greatest city on earth. In a way, this history is yours, even if you didn’t live it. Hell, I’m from Arkansas and only lived in the city for five short years. But that’s one of the remarkable things about this place: even if the city isn’t yours by birthright, it gives itself to you, and you feel, if only for a moment, a year, a decade, or more, part of something bigger. And on the first Sunday in May 2023, you will be a part of something extraordinarily big and beautiful: the TD Five Boro Bike Tour—with 32,000 people on bikes, it’s the largest recreational ride in the world.

But even this Tour is just a small part of what Bike New York does. Proceeds from this and other Bike New York rides fund our free bike education classes, whereby we’ve taught skills to more than 212,000 kids and adults since 2005. Steve Bauman, the aforementioned father of the Tour, once said that “the bicycle represents freedom more than anything else.” These classes—in addition to newer programs that provide job training for bike mechanics and pair asylum seekers with bicycles—plant seeds of freedom that will flower in ways that enrich countless lives and, by extension, the story of New York City itself.

What follows is just a taste of the history that will be riding next to you, with you, under above and in you. And with each pedal stroke, you’ll be adding something utterly new to the history of this city and this ride, even though so much has stayed the same: you’ll be adding your story.

The music critic Daniel Felsenthal recently wrote on Pitchfork.com that “New York is always dying,” an obviously click-baity declamation that nevertheless contains some serious truth that is less pessimistic than it first seems when considered both more closely and more broadly (and in mind of the great truths imparted to us by The Lion King). Without dwelling too long on the corporatization of the economy—something that is certainly not unique to New York City—, there is, of course, some hole-in-the-wall restaurant, shop, or venue that is always closing. But these closings make way for openings, perhaps for some future legendary or at the very least beloved hole-in-the-wall restaurant, shop, or venue whose eventual closing will be lamented by future generations, and so on. “It’s the circle of life / and it moves us all.” (Was Elton John really singing about a bike ride?)

Now, there are certainly dyings and closings whose significance cannot be recuperated by this intentionally optimistic outlook. On the one most obvious and most tragic hand, there is the World Trade Center, which opened four years before the first Tour and in whose twin shadows thousands of Tour riders shivered for 24 years as they waited to take off from the tip of Manhattan, as they waited to get their legs spinning and their blood pumping and to warm up in the early morning May sunshine as they reclaimed the streets on all five boroughs, those towers whose shimmering striated heights would welcome riders back, happy and sore and sated and already ready for more, as they made their way to the Battery via the Staten Island Ferry, “feeling the wind and watching Manhattan approaching,” to quote Leonard Diamond, recalling his experience at the end of the very first Tour. Few will forget the unwelcome sun that fell on riders on the morning of May 5, 2002, the scar of 9/11 just a few blocks south of where they fiddled with helmets, pedals, and their individual management of the collective grief that eclipsed them in the absence of the Towers’ shadows. Now, the Freedom Tower stands close to where the Twin Towers once stood, standing sentinel over today’s Tour start lines.

On the other hand, there are the cultural institutions that have come and gone, like the punk music venue CBGB in Manhattan’s East Village, which opened the same year as the World Trade Center and hosted some of the most important musicians of the past half-century, whose sounds have become synonymous with a certain version of New York City: the Ramones, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads. Due to rising rents, the club closed in 2006. During Game 2 of the 1977 World Series, which pitted the Yankees against the Los Angeles Dodgers, coverage shifted to a helicopter shot of Yankee Stadium and the surrounding area in the Bronx. Famed broadcaster Howard Cosell drew viewers’ attention to a raging fire consuming an abandoned building mere blocks away from the stadium. Though solitary, that blaze, broadcast to the world, came to represent the conflagrations that would plague the Bronx for years, fires understood all too well by those who called the borough home to be the cause and consequence of cyclical disinvestment in the area. But out of those ashes rose hip-hop, a cultural force born and raised in the South Bronx, built on shared communal experiences, economic mobility, joy, resilience, speaking truth to power, and hope. In Queens, the 5 Pointz building was a landmark regarded as the center of the graffiti universe for decades until it was destroyed in 2014, leaving a gaping hole in the borough’s landscape that is nevertheless filled and protected in perpetuity in the cultural memory of an artform that has transformed the globe. On 86th Street in the neighborhood of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, Lenny’s Pizza reached an international audience in 1977 when, in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta ordered two slices (“Two, two—gimme two. That’s good.”), layered one on top of the other, and ate them like that while strutting his stuff down the street to the sound of the Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive.” After 70 years, Lenny’s closed in February of this year. And in the last of the five boroughs on your Tour, Staten Island, another pizza joint—Nunzio’s, in Midland Beach, just south of the Verrazzano Bridge (which only recently won back its missing second “z”)—shut its doors after 80s years in business. Who knows what new culinary institutions will replace Lenny’s and Nunzio’s? Who knows what new New York City icon will take root in the holes left behind by yesterday’s icons? Perhaps some dream of one of the asylum seekers, helped along by a bike…

In all of these places, new life has emerged. And in the place of past Tour riders, you are here. Next year, in your place, there will be others finding their spot in that oncein-a-lifetime river of riders—always the same and always different. Which means, to say that “New York is always dying” is to simultaneously say precisely that New York is always alive and living: in life, as in New York, Elton John was right: “There’s more to see than can ever be seen / More to do than can ever be done / There’s far too much to take in here / More to find than can ever be found.”

Immediately following the very first Tour, Ellen Farrant scribbled down her memories of the ride, lest she lose them to the river of time:

“In Manhattan, we passed the South Street Seaport with its four-mast schooners in port, the Fulton Fish Market with its unforgettable aromas, Chinatown, some Bowery personalities, the beautiful brownstones, and of course, always in the background, the tall buildings. We were traveling along First Avenue. At first, there were many apartment houses and then we went into older sections with lots of stores selling everything you could think of. There were apartments over these stores and people were looking at us. It was the attitude of these people which made the ride a delight to me. If the boroughs were different, the people were the same. They were hanging out of windows, coming out of stores to line the streets. Some were cheering, some were staring. The kids were dancing up and down and running alongside us. Those who had bikes rode with us for a while. To see people smiling and cheering really made us feel fantastic. We knew we were doing something special.”

So are you. Aside from the Fulton Fish Market, all of the above and so much more persists—New York City is the same, just different. As you ride the TD Five Boro Bike Tour, how much nuance will you notice? How deeply will you drink of this river? What angles of light, bursts of sound, sudden smiles, riotous scents, bone-deep thrills will you hold onto? What stories of your own will you add to the story of the Tour? (Share yours with #TourTales.)