Between 1868 and 1903 and with little rule or regulation, New Yorkers came to use varied and incompatible means to get around individually on public streets. Pedestrians, horses, bicycles, and automobiles differed by energy source, expense, speed, convenience, safety, and social meaning. This paper examines mobility on the streets of ...
(Show more)Between 1868 and 1903 and with little rule or regulation, New Yorkers came to use varied and incompatible means to get around individually on public streets. Pedestrians, horses, bicycles, and automobiles differed by energy source, expense, speed, convenience, safety, and social meaning. This paper examines mobility on the streets of New York during this period, and analyzes how the competition to move about freely produced a new form of social capital: individual movement by machine. The study draws on statistical evidence about population and technology, journalistic evidence from the popular press, and secondary historical and sociological sources about the bicycle, the automobile, and urban development.
Until the late 1880s, pedestrians and animals dominated the streets. People moved via raw embodied energy. In 1868 after a French inventor named Lallement introduced a two-wheeled “velocipede” in Boston, news of the device, and soon the device itself, spread quickly to other large eastern cities. Velocipedes were not feasible for sustained outdoor use due to their weight and wheel design, and because streets were unkempt and crowded. Most velocipedists paid to use them in indoor riding “rinks”; few people rode them or even saw them in person.
Yet journalists were fascinated by them. In the aftermath of the Civil War as the very definition of freedom itself was redefined, writers sought to describe freedom and show what it looked like. Throughout 1869, The New York Times, Scientific American, and other popular papers and magazines ran featured articles and regular columns about velocipedes, many with detailed illustrations. Readers witnessed gendered and class-based representations of them, largely without direct reference to race, and constructed a new objective in the collective imagination: individual freedom of movement generated by a machine.
Although the velocipede “craze” lasted only about a year, during the following two decades, mechanics and inventors improved on the velocipede’s alleged “boneshaker” design. By the 1880s, innovations to the “bicycle” dramatically magnified riders’ embodied energy, enabling speed, ease, and individual control that outpaced any other form of movement. Spurred by years of editorial representation, thousands of people riding better-quality devices revised their definition of freedom to include fast individual movement.
From 1893 into the early 1900s the automobile, or “horseless carriage,” inherited the meanings that were inspired decades earlier by the velocipede. Pedestrians, horse-users, bicyclists, and auto drivers attempted to share the streets and held a wide range of mutual prejudices, each arguing for the right to move about at the expense of the others. It was anything but obvious whose needs should take precedence on public roads. Automobile advocates argued that disembodied energy—petroleum, steam, and electricity—implied a form of social capital superior to the embodied energy on which most people still relied. Individual movement generated by disembodied energy thus became a new expression of freedom. The press portrayed the ensuing conflicts as a competition for location on the social hierarchy, based increasingly on revising and redirecting tensions between users of embodied and disembodied energy.
The presentation includes a number of images, as well as a short film clip from the early 20th century showing the intricate interplay of pedestrians, horse users, bicyclists, and auto drivers on a city street.
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