Precious Cargo

Transporting Kids by Bike

Leaving the beach, Father's Day, Asbury Park, 2023.

One of my more distinct early childhood memories was standing on the sidewalk and watching coal being delivered to the apartment building where we lived. This was in Manhattan in the 1950s. 

Everything about the coal truck was black. A coal chute protruded from the back of the truck and extended to an opening in the sidewalk next to the building. The truck tipped its cargo box just like an ordinary dump truck, and there was a whooshing, rumbling sound as the coal tumbled into the coal bunker in the basement of the building.

And then, of course, the coal was burned to provide heat and hot water.

Arriving at Little League practice, Prospect Park, 
Brooklyn, 2023.

Today, we're unaccustomed to seeing fly ash in the air. I remember a freshly baked lemon meringue pie, sitting on the sill of the open kitchen window to cool. A piece of black fly ash from a furnace or an incinerator floated into the window space and settled gently on the white meringue. It was a bit bigger than a quarter.

Pickup from after-school program,
Philadelphia, 2023.

Catastrophe? No. Just another day. The well-practiced solution was a deft scoop with a small spoon, and the meringue was once again immaculate.

(Newspapers made particularly interesting fly ash when incinerated.)

Chestnut Street, West Philly, 2017.

My Grandpa Tom was a dairy farmer who lived on a dirt road and had a dirt driveway. Every once in a while he would bring a scuttle full of cinders up from the basement and scatter them on the driveway. 

Eventually he decided to go along with the modern world. He got an oil-fired furnace, and the cinders in the driveway were overlain with asphalt.

Boardwalk, Asbury Park, 2023.

But to come back to the sidewalk of the building where I grew up. I remember the grocery delivery bikes. These had a large aluminum box attached to the front to carry groceries. They were quite common in the 1950s, but shortly thereafter they seem to have vanished completely.  

Grays Ferry Triangles, 23rd and South, Philadelphia, 2023.

I don't have confidence in the historical information I found online, so I'm going to skip forward to the re-emergence of the cargo bike, this time as a way to transport small children. Here the Dutch were clearly the innovators, using something they called a bakfiets, or box-bike. This was an adaptation of a traditional Dutch cargo bike, and it became very popular in the years after 2000. (For more, see this story, which seems reasonably solid.)

Rittenhouse Square, 2023.

The Americans followed suit a bit later, but with typically American enthusiasm. Today, in Philadelphia's center city, I see them regularly as I walk around. In addition to transporting children, they're clearly good with groceries and other relatively small items. Other uses - bringing furniture home from Ikea, for instance - seem pretty rare, but one should never underestimate the ingenuity of a bicyclist. Here's a shot from Fort Greene Park, in Brooklyn, of a fellow on a regular bike, transporting what appears to be a truck tire.

Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, 2023.

See also Jane Jacobs Was a Bicyclist; Looking and Not Seeing, Listening and Not Hearing; Forging Community - One Flat Tire at a Time.