Williamsburg hipsters get a lot of bad press, but today, they are great heroes of the Open City. Apparently, two of them painted DIY bike lanes on the Hasidic-controlled stretch of Bedford Avenue between Flushing and Division avenues, where a city-installed bike lane was recently removed. According to posts on Gothamist and The Huffington Post, local Hasids asked the city to remove the bike lanes because they posed a "safety and religious hazard," and the Bloomberg administration, fearing retribution from an important constituency during an election, complied, claiming that the operation was "part of ongoing bike network adjustments in the area."
Rarely is the battle for the Open City so clearly illustrated. Communities have protested bike lanes for safety reasons before, but, so far as I know, this is the first instance of a community citing a "religious hazard." The source of this hazard? Apparently, Hasids have been disturbed by “hotties” who traverse their neighborhood on bikes in “shorts and skirts.” Hotties in shorts and skirts may violate the community's dress code, but in case anyone forgot, in New York City, streets are part of the public realm. Unlike in say, a gated community, streets in the city are the jurisdiction of the city, not the community. What if a Muslim community complained that non-veiled women biked passed their community? Would they have the right to require women who passed by their community to wear veils? By catering to this ridiculous criticism, the city is setting up a frightening precedent. Indeed, it is exactly this sort of home rule b.s. that facilitates segregation, and works against the open city ideal. Thomas Jefferson's argument that it is a fundamental American right to seek "new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness" worked well for us when we were establishing our independence from England, but at a smaller scale, it has only given small municipalities and communities the means to exclude those who don't belong (i.e. blacks, Jews, the poor). Hasids can't put a gate around their piece of Williamsburg and privatize the streets, but they can do their best to undermine those things that introduce otherness into their community.
So cheers to the guerilla hipsters who painted the bike lanes. This blog would like to thank you for reminding us that public streets are the most elementary unit of the open city, giving us as they do a conduit to legally "trespass" in places in which others might not make us feel welcome.
