Doesn’t it seem like Spring comes to New York City just a little bit later every year? Nevermind.
First stop, the Museum of the City of New York has a new exhibition, Cycling in the City, where you can look at other people doing that thing bicyclists call the closest humans can come to flying without leaving the ground.
The exhibition traces the fads, false starts, complaints about, and astonishing array of unique cultures that define the history of biking in New York City. Making full use of the extraordinary MCNY archives, the exhibition is accompanied by co-curator Evan Friss’s new book, On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City.
Like all people of taste and discernment, we have been fans of Professor Friss since his first book, The Cycling City came out a few years ago. The Cycling City covers the enormous bicycling fad of the 1890s, placing it in the context of the wider transport landscape of the pre-automobile city. Gripping!
You can read the Bicycle Utopia interview with Professor Friss.
Cycling in the City might leave you thinking, and perhaps not for the first time, that New York City bike culture has always been a little bit punk, long before even punk was punk. Roll over to the Museum of Arts and Design for a full immersion the anti-nostalgia nostalgia that is Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die.
Perhaps the radical cosmopolitanism that was the pre-condition for punk is inherent to New York City. Before punk was punk, jazz was punk, and jazz is New York, and vice versa.
Early 20th century New York City teemed with immigrants, and nowhere more so than Harlem, where transplants brought genius from the American South, Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America to northern Manhattan. In this bubbling cauldron of languages, cultures, and musical traditions, jazz, the first truly American art from, was invented. For over 100 years, from river to river musicians in Harlem get together nightly to improvise on everything that is known about music, sharing, stealing, and reinventing musical forms, reminding us who we are, where we came from, and where we might be headed.
At the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, on April 18, Arturo O’Farrill and Malika Zarra will bring together Afro Fusion sounds with Berber, Moroccan, Arabic and French influences.
On the Lower East Side, closer both geographically and historically to punk as punk, the now venerable Arlene’s Grocery is where bands like Arcade Fire or Lana Del Rey have gone to reconnect with their inner punk since the mid 1990s.
So can you when Brooklyn Music School’s Artist Certificate Ensemble and Motown Monday’s Band perform there on April 26. Come and enjoy a selection of Motown hits and more.
In New York City, the unexpected is what’s expected, so you can reasonably anticipate there’s one more snowstorm in store for us before Summer clobbers Winter once and for all–or, at least until months that end in “R.”
If you just can’t take one more minute of the cruel joke that is Spring in New York City, why not just leave for a while? Siciclando’s eight-day Sicily Baroque Bike Tour starts on May 12.
Bike breathtaking landscapes among the spectacular cities of Catania, Ragusa, Modica, and Siracusa. Savor the flavors of North Africa, Greece, France, and Spain combined into the unique and complex culinary traditions of Sicily.
And if your biking level is “I don’t know how to ride a bike” or “I haven’t been on a bike since I was a kid,” or maybe you are a kid ready to graduate from three to two wheels, April is a good time to scrape the rust off your pedaling skills, or to learn to ride a bike, no matter how old you are.
Bike New York’s Learn to Ride classes will have you whizzing along in a safe, supportive and fun atmosphere.
Before you know it, you’ll feel almost like you’re flying.
