The ways the bicycle madness of the 1890s reached the west side.
San Francisco is consistently rated one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Bike-riders here, as represented by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, have political clout. The Board of Supervisors appoints a Bicycle Advisory Committee. Hundreds of bicyclists ride through downtown for "Critical Mass" each month. The SF Municipal Transit Authority administers a city-adopted, 190-page Bicycle Plan, under which at least 45 miles of city streets have been marked with bike lanes and over 1,500 bike-parking racks have been installed.
While there remains room for improvement to make San Francisco a bicycler's paradise (can SFMTA or the Bike Coalition do something about all these hills?), the zeal for making the city more hospitable to pedal-pushers has antecedents in the late nineteenth century and the roads to Ocean Beach.
After a long struggle with the park commission, San Francisco bicycle clubs won greater access to Golden Gate Park's excellent roads in the early 1890s. Every weekend, packs of cyclists rode through the park to Ocean Beach, where a section of the Great Highway had recently been graded and paved. One Sunday in 1896, an Examiner reporter stationed himself on a park path to count the cyclists that passed between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. He tallied almost 3,000.
Suddenly, beachside roadhouses and refreshment stands competed for the bicyclist trade. Wooden racks for bike parking went up beside hitching posts. The Villa Miramar, a bar at the end of today's Irving Street, put up a sign advertising itself as the "Wheelmen's Rest." North of the park, Adolph Sutro had a three-story chalet erected on the southwest corner of La Playa and Fulton Street that he named "Cycler's Rest."
It wasn't only wheelmen taking to the park and beach roads. Scores of women took up riding, some shockingly forsaking skirts and dresses for more comfortable blousy-trousered "bloomers." (The Examiner reporter who did the one-day Golden Gate Park census tabulated that bloomer-wearers outnumbered skirt-wearers 4 to 1.) One club of female cyclists, the Falcons, actually had a major role in starting the community of Carville by renting an old horsecar from Adolph Sutro to use as a clubhouse.
After hard rides, the Falcons took naps on the soft, long seats of the old transit vehicle. They built a shed addition on the back of the car to store their bikes, and installed a kitchen with three coal oil stoves. The members held frequent dinner parties, often with tongue-in-cheek descriptions sent to the newspapers to mock conventional society recaps. An outdoor banquet in August 1896 was listed to have entrées of "brown beans, baked beans, barnacles, spider toes, frog legs, and Frangipanni." A men's bicycle club soon followed the Falcons and also rented a car clubhouse from Sutro.
By the early 1900s, many of the young bicyclists who once enthusiastically spent their Saturdays pedaling to San Jose began drifting off to newer and faster technologies like motorcycles and automobiles. Autos, begun as weekend toys and novelties, rose in the twentieth century to being essential tools of commerce and American life.
Bicycles never went away, of course. Ocean Beach usually had a shop or two where one could rent a bike for the day. Some old-timers will remember Shinn's, on the 1200 block of La Playa, or Ferguson's down on Wawona Street. But for many Americans, bicycles had become little more than a child's toy or a poor man's conveyance.
This attitude began to change in the 1970s. The bicycle made a comeback, insinuating itself into daily life for exercise, sport, transportation, and, with concerns about global warning, oil dependence, and traffic congestion, a possible panacea for "urban unease."
Perhaps we haven't quite returned to having 3,000 cyclists in the park or on the Great Highway on a Sunday, but the ride is still beautiful, inspiring, and, in this city of inclines, relatively flat.
Page launched 6 December 2016.