May Day, May Day! Scenes from two different Chicago bike rides celebrating the labor holiday
This post isn’t completely within Streetsblog Chicago’s wheelhouse, but I thought many of our readers would enjoy it, so I wrote it up over weekend for fun.
Last May Day, I took part in a bike tour of labor landmarks led by local bike advocacy legend Randy Neufeld, cofounder of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, which later became the Active Transportation Alliance in 2008. Joining us on our trip through the South Side were Leonard Rau, a brand strategist who helped out with the name change, and Avi Stopper, a Denver resident who leads a project based in that city called Bike Streets.
As it happened, a couple hours later that day, early Chicago Critical Mass organizers Gin Kilgore and Michael Burton led another bicycle journey on the Northwest and West sides that intersected with Neufeld’s itinerary at one point. I’ll provide a gallery of images from both rides shortly.
But first, here’s a quick interview I did with Avi Stopper about Bike Streets. It’s a similar project to the Mellow Chicago Bike Map I created for the Chicago Reader, most recently in 2020, which was converted into an app.
John Greenfield: Tell me about Bike Streets.
Avi Stopper: It all started with what we call the Low-Stress Denver Bike Map. With advocacy groups around the country, we make low stress bike maps so that people can more easily navigate their communities. And we also do a lot of advocacy work to try to figure out how cities can codify those low stress community networks and turn those into formal, complete networks. So we’re really interested in this question about how cities can rapidly, like in two, three, four years, create the first version of a complete bike network. All right.
JG: What brings you to town?
AS: A University of Chicago reunion. I lived here for ten years. It’s a great opportunity to ride with you guys, and I’m eager to see Randy in his own environment. I’ve taken him on a tour of Denver.
JG: All right, so this is kind of payback.
AS: Yeah!
Without further ado, here are images from Neufeld’s South Side tour and Kilgore and Burton’s West Side tour. I took all photos of the former. Burton shot all the images of the latter, unless noted otherwise.
Randy Neufeld’s South Side May Day ride
Gin Kilgore’s and Michael Burton’s Northwest and West Side May Day journey
The Haymarket Martyrs Memorial at the cemetery, with the inscription, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”
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