Hot Wheels

Henry Ford was looking for a new and better way of exploring the city and the countryside. He never liked horses, which were expensive and messy. Trains and trolleys didn’t offer the kind of individual mobility that would allow someone to satisfy wanderlust at a moment’s whim. Then one day in 1893, the man destined to become the world’s most famous automaker brought home what countless enthusiasts were touting as the perfect mode of personal locomotion: a bicycle.

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Illustration by Craig LaRotonda

During the Gay ’90s, Detroit was a city on wheels — but not of the variety that would one day earn it the distinction of being the motorcar capital of the world.

“Cass Avenue was so crowded with wheels after dark that the street twinkled with the tiny headlights and the air was filled with the clanging of bicycle bells,” Florence Marsh, one of Ford’s contemporaries, later wrote of the two-wheel mania of the late 19th century. Pedestrians on Cass, Lafayette, and other popular cycling thoroughfares “waited in vain for a chance to cross the road.”

Bicycling was the first national fad, setting free millions of men, women, and children, and popularizing such terms as “face plant” and “scorcher.” It was as much a social movement as a pastime. Cyclists championed the fight for better roads, helped advance female emancipation, and prepped the world for the coming automobile.

Bicycles came of age in Europe in the middle 1800s. The first regular sightings of “boneshakers” on Detroit streets occurred in the years following the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. These were giraffe-high contraptions with the pedals attached directly to an oversized front wheel. The rider, who needed a short stepladder or horse block to mount, sat almost 5 feet off the ground. The comical contrast between the front and rear wheels caused the British to call them “penny-farthings,” after their largest and smallest coins, though the style was more commonly referred to as the “ordinary.” They were as expensive as they were dangerous, making bicycling the pastime of a select few. In the spring of 1879, the Detroit Bicycle Club was formed. In a city of nearly 120,000 people, it had no more than 20 members and no clubhouse.

The sport blossomed with the invention of the “safety” bicycle, which by 1886 resembled the bike we know today. Pedals powered the chain-driven rear wheel, which was now of equal diameter with the front. Tires, once solid rubber, were now pneumatic. All of this made control and braking much easier (though many die-hards would continue to ride ordinaries). That summer, a state meet was held in Detroit, sponsored by local bicyclists. Membership grew and a clubhouse was rented. In 1890, two rival groups — the Detroit and Star bicycle clubs — reorganized as the Detroit chapter of the League of American Wheelmen, an influential national group lobbying hard for improved roads for its members to ride on.

Modern motorists who grumble about their car disappearing into a yawning pothole have no idea how abysmal road conditions were in their great-grandparents’ day. Detroit’s streets were a hodgepodge of cedar block and cobblestone construction veined with trolley tracks, which made for a jolting ride that left a cyclist’s jaw aching, spine screaming, and kidneys feeling as if they’d been whacked with a shovel. At that, city streets were an improvement over unpaved country roads, which were either dirt or gravel and often a challenge to traverse in either case. Because mud, dust, ruts, and chuckholes weren’t the obstacles to horses that they were to cyclists, property owners felt no urgency to do something about the sorry conditions. Over time, cyclists were able to see a fraction of America’s 2.1 million miles of rural roads become paved and identified with signposts, though the greatest benefits of the “good roads” movement they initiated wouldn’t be realized for another generation, when local road commissions and the federal government took over responsibility.
In 1890, Jefferson, Lafayette, Cass, and Second became the first Detroit streets to be paved with asphalt. That summer, a group of Detroit Wheelmen garbed in knickers and visor caps rode to Niagara Falls and back, a 300-mile adventure that helped gain it the national body’s convention the next year.

Detroit became a cycling hotbed, with the Wheelmen and other clubs sponsoring meets and excursions to communities both near and far. Completing a “century run” of 100 miles within 18 hours earned “centurions” an impressive-looking badge from the Century Road Club of America each time the feat was done. “Uphill and downhill on dirt roads, it was not a trip for the short-winded,” one reporter said of one such run to Port Huron, “and even the long-winded were content to return by steamer, which they always did.”

Beer gardens and rustic resorts catered to cyclists at the end of a hard day of pedaling. In 1889, the first bridge to Belle Isle was built, opening up the island playground to bikers. Beller’s Garden, near the bridge, did a land-rush business. “As early as 7 o’clock each clear summer evening, Jefferson Avenue was thronged with cyclists heading for the bridge, nearly half of them female,” Don Lochbiler wrote years later in The Detroit News. “Many stopped at Beller’s for refreshment, and two long racks were provided for the wheels. Under the elms, large tents were decorated with Chinese lanterns and a family of musicians … entertained on zithers and mandolins.”

On holidays, there were prize races on Belle Isle, with winners receiving everything from a concert piano to a shaving mug with the champ’s initials etched in large gold letters. Bicycle racing was a professional sport decades before football and basketball, with fans avidly following the exploits of such cyclists as Eddie “Cannon” Bald and Charles “Mile-A-Minute” Murphy through sporting journals and tobacco cards. Local favorites included Tom Cooper of the Detroit Wheelmen and his good friend and fellow “fast speed freak,” Barney Oldfield, who hailed from Ohio. Speed demons, both on and off the track, were known as “scorchers.”

By 1896, the bicycling craze was approaching its peak. That year the Wheelmen — characterized by one observer as “the new bon tons of Detroit’s smart set” — built a clubhouse for its 450 members at 53-55 E. Adams (a site now occupied by Comerica Park). The ornate three-story stone-and-brick structure, which cost an estimated $40,000, featured an auditorium, library, kitchen, dining room, baths, billiard and whist tables, and a bowling alley. A long wrought-iron bike rack ran along the front of the building. The club became the scene of dances, banquets, and other social events.

The pastime’s exclusivity faded as more and more people discovered its joys. Prices fell to the point that most members of the middle class could afford a new or used bike. The cost of the cheapest model in the Sears catalog dropped from $55.95 in 1894 to $17.85 four years later. This still was a significant expenditure at a time when the average working man made about $50 a month. But stores offered credit payments of $1 or $2 a week. According to P.N. Jacobsen, a cyclist enthusiast in the 1890s, local thoroughfares became “daily thronged with wheelmen,” the most reckless of whom wove in and out of traffic as teamsters swore at them and streetcar conductors shook their fists. Pedestrians and dogs were at risk. Minor accidents — a skinned knee, a bent wheel — were common. Looking to curb the number of nighttime mishaps, a city ordinance required riders to use a small kerosene-lit brass lamp when cycling after dark.

The Detroit Police Department’s “scorcher cops” had their handlebars full controlling sidewalk cyclists and chasing scofflaws down city streets, sometimes in freewheeling Keystone-Kop fashion. As far as is known, their tactics didn’t include using a portable slingshot-like device to fire small lead balls at a scorcher’s wheels in hopes of breaking the spokes and disabling his machine — a practice reportedly used by Chicago’s finest. But more than one madly pedaling offender was “brought to grief” by a tenacious “wheelcop” whose speed and lung capacity surprised the object of his pursuit. “It was one of those cyclized policemen,” noted a local historian, “who gained nameless immortality a few years later when he wrote the first violation ticket for a speeder in one of those new-fangled automobiles.”

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