"Unnamed" Ghost Bike Memorial To Be Installed Outside 90th Precinct Station In Williamsburg Sunday

This Sunday the NYC Street Memorial Project will hold the 7th Annual Memorial Ride and Walk, to remember pedestrians and cyclists killed in NYC over the past year. (Details here.) Cyclists will ride from locations in Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and Brooklyn and traverse the city, stopping at sixteen ghost bikes, laying flowers, and paying respects to bicyclists killed since 2011. Walkers, meanwhile, will visit the locations of pedestrian fatalities along McGuinness Boulevard since 1995.

Outside the 90th Precinct Stationhouse in Williamsburg, the final "unnamed" Ghost Bike, installed for bicyclists and pedestrians whose deaths were not reported in the media, will be installed. There were more bicyclists (total of 4, more by far) killed in the boundaries of that precinct than in any other in the city, according to Jessie Singer, who co-founded the memorial project back in 2005. (The DOT says 21 bicyclists and 134 pedestrians were killed on New York City streets last year.) In an interview with ioby, Singer recalls how the iconic project started:

We were all bike riders because we were poor and it was fun, simply, and that was it. And then in 2005, one member was riding his bike and came upon a crash. A cyclist had been hit by a car. It had happened just moments before. It was a woman named Liz Padilla killed on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. We had heard about a project going on in St. Louis that people were painting white bikes at the sites of bicyclist crashes. And we said, “Hey, let’s do it, just this one time.” ...

What was so jarring about it was suddenly thinking about someone who was a stranger to all of us. We didn’t know Liz Padilla, but we were building this thing in her memorial and suddenly we felt this relationship with a stranger and called attention to that death. And we put up the bike, we made a plaque, we locked it to the corner nearest to where she was killed, and we all turned to each other and said, “Wow, that was so hard, let’s never ever do that again.”

And then a week passed, and on Houston Street, another young woman named Brandie Bailey was killed. We all looked at each other and said, “How could we not?” And so we made a bike for Brandie Bailey and it was even more emotional. And we installed it, and again, we said to each other, “Let’s never do this again.”

And then a week passed and a young man named Andrew Ross Morgan was killed, also on Houston Street, a block away. And we built a bike for him and then we couldn’t stop. And now its 80 bikes and 6 years later, the ghost bike project hasn’t changed much. It’s just a venue to make a death -- that would otherwise disappear -- be public and noticeable and present for a long time after the city’s new cycles have rolled. And that’s how the project started.

Read the whole interview here, it's quite inspiring. You can get day-of-ride updates by following NYC Street Memorials on Twitter, and there's a detailed ride schedule here. At 4 p.m., all the rides will converge by the 90th Precinct Stationhouse at the unnamed memorial, at Union Avenue & S 5th Street in Williamsburg.