Note: I'm currently on a family trip and not working normal hours. Email and message responses will be delayed and story and posting volumes here and on our social media accounts will not be at their usual levels until I return to Portland September 4th. Thanks for your patience and understanding. - Jonathan Maus, BikePortland Publisher and Editor
Newspaper archives, research from historians, generational trends — we love looking back as much as looking forward. Scroll down for stories that help put our current transportation policies and projects into perspective.
Governor Geer, bike lover.(Photo: Oregon State Library) Remember Oregon’s tenth governor, Theodore T. Geer? He’s the great Oregonian who, in May of 1900, rode his bike from the capital in Salem to Champoeg to establish a monument to an historic vote that took place there in 1843. That vote paved the way to Oregon statehood … Read more
Employees of the Oregon State Highway Division appear in a 1972 article about bicycling’s rise in popularity. See below for images from Oregon newspapers from as far back as 1899.
As many of you head to Salem for the Oregon Active Transportation Summit (it begins tomorrow!), I thought it’d be fun to take a step back in our history. 40 years ago, on June 19th 1971, dozens of Portlanders got on their bikes and rode to Salem for the signing of HB 1700, the Bicycle … Read more
Photographer James Mason as a young boy in Beaverton in 1953.– See his photos below – (All images © James Mason) A few months ago, a man named James Mason popped up on the always interesting OBRA email list. He shared a link to photographs of bicycle racing in Portland he took back in the … Read more
“Public streets are for the movement of people, not long-term storage of vehicles.”— from Bicycle Facilities for Portland: A Comprehensive Plan, 1974 A two-way cycle track at NE Glisan and 39th, a physically separated bikeway on SE 52nd, on-street parking removal to make room for bike traffic, painted crosswalks specifically for bikes (crossbikes?), a multi-use … Read more
[This article was written by Kelly Dodd. It first appeared in the June 2010 issue of Jan Heine’s Bicycle Quarterly magazine and is being published here with the author’s permission. We are extremely grateful for the opportunity to share this historical account of a Portland bicycling pioneer, devoted advocate, and legendary bike racer.] Frans Pauwels … Read more
“By the 1970s, less than thirty of the two hundred seventy… buildings downtown remained…When did Portland start to trade its most unique built feature for acres and acres of pay by the hour asphalt?” — Dan Haneckow, historian A recent post on local historian Dan Haneckow’s Cafe Unknown blog, delved into a sad part of … Read more
Mr. Twain in 1871.(Photo: Wikipedia) Just came across (via @cascadebicycle on Twitter) an amazing bit of Portland bike history via the Seattle-based Crosscut blog. 115 years ago today, America’s beloved nomad, author and commentator Mark Twain visited our little logging town and had some pretty big ideas about biking. Crosscut’s Knute Berger was researching Twain’s … Read more
Cover of The Lost Cyclist. David Herlihy’s forthcoming book, The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance, has a Portland connection that’s over a century old. Herlihy, author of the award-winning Bicycle: The History, got in touch recently to tell us a bit about the story of Frank Lenz, … Read more
[Editor’s note: This is our second column by Oregon bicycle historian Eric Lundgren. He last wrote about T. T. Geer, an Oregon Governor a century ago who was an early adopter of the bicycle for commuting and touring. This column is about the career of Bemer S. Pague, a weatherman, bicycle advocate, and lawyer from … Read more
[Editor’s note: Eric Lundgren is Oregon’s preeminent bicycle historian. He is working on a book about Portland’s “golden age of cycling,” and has provided his historical perspective to this site in the past. He provided this article about our first bicycling governor in honor of the state’s Sesquicentennial this week.] Governor T.T. Geer(Image courtesy of … Read more
Comment of the Week: Gratitude for N/NE Broadway project