Biking Outside the Lines in New York City
Thirty-nine years ago this summer, Ed Koch, the mayor of New York City, held a press conference on the steps of City Hall, where he declared a bicycle ban in midtown Manhattan. Beginning that August, cycling during weekday working hours on Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues from Thirty-first to Fifty-ninth Streets would be prohibited. The law targeted cyclists who rode outside of bike lanes, weaved through traffic, and darted upstream, going the wrong way on one-way streets, as well as bike messengers, whose habits, Koch complained, threatened “the safety of any New Yorker who is not blessed with eyes in the back of his or her head.” The response from city cyclists and activists was swift. Koch had cited bicycle-related deaths of pedestrians. What about car-related deaths of cyclists? Packs of bikers formed roving protest pelotons, cycling down avenues and stymieing traffic. Years later, one of the protest organizers, Charles Komanoff, described the movement’s modus operandi: “Our stately pace, perhaps five mph, was slow enough that passersby could look past our bikes and see our bodies and faces.”
Less than two months after Koch announced the midtown bike ban, a judge ruled that it had been issued illegally, and several months later the city dropped it. I thought of Koch’s ill-fated proposal when I came across a picture of five bikers riding down Seventh Avenue, popping wheelies in the middle of traffic, in Brian Finke’s new book, “Bike Life.” The riders, who are in their early teens, are flying toward the hazy mirage of a neon-lit Times Square. On the left side of the image, plainly visible, is a bike lane that the bikers have, conspicuously, avoided. Finke’s book is full of scenes like this: riders in the middle of streets, bridges, and even highways. They are calm and focussed, often doing tricks, sometimes carrying passengers perched on their rear axles—and they are almost always in the way.
On a recent spring morning, I biked over to Fort Greene Park to meet Finke, who lives nearby. Finke is fifty, and has a short bushy beard and a friendly smile. A longtime New York City cyclist, he first started taking the pictures that appear in “Bike Life” in 2020, after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid social distancing, Finke would find out about group rides on Instagram and cycle out on a vintage Italian road bike, with his camera dangling around his neck. In the first few months of the pandemic, as people grew wary of public transportation, bicycling exploded in New York. By the summer, several bike stores around the city had sold out their inventories; in 2020, the city’s Department of Transportation tracked almost two million more bike rides than the year before. The fact that so many city dwellers fled New York for less densely populated areas also created new space on the road.
“Before the pandemic, the N.Y.P.D. would crack down on big group rides. But, during COVID, I feel like the cops were just kind of, like, Let the kids blow off steam,” Finke said. “It was a time period where the city just let the riders do their thing.” Finke’s book features people (of all ages) riding in large groups—middle schoolers are routinely at the front of the packs. In one photo, a preteen girl is riding on just one wheel, her tongue hanging out in concentration, while several older kids wearing balaclavas follow her lead. “She’s hot stuff,” Finke told me. “A lot of the riders, they’re city kids. The streets are their back yards.”
There is a peacocking element to Finke’s subjects. Some of their bikes showcase ostentatious parts, like neon-pink top load stems and oversized klunker bars—wide, sweeping handlebars that are used for motorcycles and were co-opted by mountain-bike racers and B.M.X.-ers. Another rider performs an extreme wheelie—riding around without a front wheel. “Say someone’s riding down Broadway and surfing on their bike, or popping a wheelie for multiple blocks, it’s like they’re there to be seen. People are clapping, cheering them on,” Finke said. He mentioned to me a specific photo, taken in Central Park, of a shirtless man doing tricks on an electric-blue bike with matching blue grips and anodized blue rims. Riders like him, he said, “kind of reminded me of voguing in the eighties. Everyone has their own personal style.” Although Finke sometimes shoots his subjects from behind, simulating the feeling of being on a bicycle and pedalling hard to keep up, more of his shots are taken from the side, firmly casting the viewer in the role of bystander. As tourists wandering through midtown or commuters trying to jaywalk through traffic might, we admire the riders as they whiz past.
Of course, the thrill of performing speedy and reckless tricks can end abruptly; Finke’s book is dotted with crashes. “It happened a lot. Once a friend crashed and broke his collarbone,” Finke said. “It was during the ride, and I had to take him to the emergency room.” One memorable shot, taken near Union Square on a sunny day, shows a rider splayed out on the ground, the group he had been biking with parting around him. A few bikers stop to check if he’s O.K. as pedestrians rubberneck from sidewalks. There is not a car in sight—the riders have taken the street over through sheer numbers, ignoring the bike path right next to them.
Finke has shot in all five boroughs, and “Bike Life” takes you on a tour of all the different types of riding that the city offers. There are the obvious landmarks—a group ride taking over the West Side Highway by the Freedom Tower, or kids zooming past Broadway theatres—but these give way to peaceful stretches of the outer boroughs. The bikers in Finke’s photographs visit empty alleys in the Bronx, beaches in South Brooklyn, and hazy green parks in far-flung Staten Island. Finke told me that riding during the pandemic reminded him of Koch’s New York, when the city was grittier, and its micro-mobility infrastructure less developed. “The landscape and the shop storefronts became a character in the photos themselves. And, during that time, a lot of them were closed and spray-painted. It looked like the eighties,” Finke said.
Finke’s photos of the outer boroughs are among his best. In one shot, taken in the Bronx, five teens stand over their bikes on a grassy highway median, surrounded by lush trees. It’s late on a May evening, and there are no cars in sight, but the boys are still boxed in by a highway; they look in all different directions, as though strategizing the best way to cross it. Koch’s bike ban sought to make New York more sanitized and orderly by constraining it. The cyclists who prevented its enactment interpreted the ban differently. For them, placing limits on where bicycles were allowed to go would have shrunk the city, not geographically but experientially. Finke’s book, and its depictions of riders pushing the limits of rideable space, into its busy streets and outer boroughs, is a reminder that there is still room for the city to grow.
