Brooklyn Bike Activists Are Arrested
The bike lane issue continues to mushroom
December 09, 2009
There is new news today on those activists who filmed themselves painting a bike lane onto a stretch of Brookyn’s Bedford Avenue in the middle of the night. They did so, recall, in protest of the mayor’s office’s decision to remove the lane that used to be there, apparently in order to appease the neighborhood’s Satmar Hasidim, who don’t like immodestly dressed Williamsburg hipsters biking by. The activists were initially caught red-handed by the Satmars’ Shomrim patrol, who called the cops; now, a couple days later, the renegade painters have been arrested. Incidentally, Baruch Herzfeld, who has made a name for himself as a sort of Hasid-hipster liason on the bike-lane issue (and, believe it or not, it truly is quite the issue for many), said the activists contained members of both camps. However, one of the two arrested painters offered this credo to the New York Post: “We’re self-hating Jewish hipsters.”
The guerilla paint-job video is below:
Bikers in the Spokey [NY Post]
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.
