Ghost Bikes

TUESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2009

A cousin to the Roadside Memorial is the Ghost Bike, or Ghostcycle. Ghost Bikes are memorials to those killed while riding their bicycles, and are placed at the scene of the accident. Ghost Bikes began is St. Louis and have spread as both memorial and protest, all over the world.

http://nymag.com/news/features/47819/

In June 2005, Kevin Caplicki was biking down Fifth Avenue in Park Slope when he came upon the body of cyclist Elizabeth Padilla, who, minutes before, had been killed by a delivery truck. Caplicki belonged to the street-art collective Visual Resistance, and at its next meeting, they decided to construct a memorial for Padilla. The group took a spare bike, painted it white, and chained it to a sign post near the accident. The installation no longer looked like a bicycle as much as the negative space where one should have been, as if it had been cut out of a photograph by an X-Acto knife. It became New York’s first Ghost Bike.
The idea can be traced to Patrick Van Der Tuin, a St. Louis bike mechanic who in 2003 installed a Ghost Bike at the site of an accident he witnessed in the neighborhood of Holly Hills. (The victim ultimately survived and befriended him.) After Van Der Tuin and his friends created fifteen more Ghost Bikes in the St. Louis area, the project was featured in Dirt Rag, a national cycling magazine. He was inundated with e-mails. “Some people were adamant that this was a bad idea,” Van Der Tuin says. “They thought that we were discouraging people from cycling.” But others were moved by the spectral sight of bicycles repurposed as tombstones. Ghost Bikes started to appear in Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh and have since spread to 35 cities around the world. “I had no idea it was going to be a viral thing,” says Van Der Tuin. -from New York Magazinehttp://nymag.com/news/features/47819/

http://www.streetsblog.org/2006/12/05/eric-ng-memorial-bike-ride-this-saturday/

Eric Ng Memorial Bike Ride This Saturday
by Aaron Naparstek on December 5, 2006
There will be a memorial bike ride for Eric Ng, the cyclist killed by a drunk driver on the Hudson River Greenway last week. Details below. Also, here is a note from the Visual Resistance blog. VR are the guys who make the "ghost bikes:"
I've been making ghost bikes for strangers for a year and a half. Eric's is not the first that made me cry, but it's the first that made me hurt. A big group of Eric's friends spent the weekend mourning, talking, and, finally, making. We made a ghost bike for him on Saturday and sunflowers on Sunday. Eric's memorial plaque reads "Love & Rage” no resting in peace for this rock star.
We are planning for a memorial ride this Saturday, December 9th, meeting at 1pm in Washington Square Park and then proceeding to the site of Eric's death. Non-bikers can head straight to the site, on the West Side bike path near Clarkson St. Please bring flowers (especially sunflowers), sidewalk chalk, paint, whatever you want. There will be a memorial service after the ride with music and a slideshow, and a party later that night.

-from streetsblog http://www.streetsblog.org/2006/12/05/eric-ng-memorial-bike-ride-this-saturday/

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/40414-Kelly-Wallace-1983-2007/?rel=inf

Kelly Wallace, 1983-2007

Kelly Wallace was killed on May 6, after her bike was hit by a car in a crosswalk at the intersection of Cambridge Street and Harvard Avenue, in Allston. Near that spot, a stark white “ghost bike” stands in her memory, adorned with handwritten notes and a profusion of blooming flowers.http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/40414-Kelly-Wallace-1983-2007/?rel=inf

http://www.ghostbikes.org/photos?page=1

Here is an explanatory excerpt from the Ghost Bike site:

Ghost Bikes are small and somber memorials for bicyclists who are killed or hit on the street. A bicycle is painted all white and locked to a street sign near the crash site, accompanied by a small plaque. They serve as reminders of the tragedy that took place on an otherwise anonymous street corner, and as quiet statements in support of cyclists' right to safe travel.

The first ghost bikes were created in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003, and they have since appeared in nearly 75 cities throughout the world. For those who create and install the memorials, the death of a fellow bicyclist hits home. We all travel the same unsafe streets and face the same risks; it could just as easily be any one of us. Each time we say we hope to never have to do it again -- but we remain committed to making these memorials as long as they are needed.http://www.ghostbikes.org/

Roadside Memorials

November 2008

Photo: Stephen Chalmer

http://www.humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/in_a_drive_by_world/

HOCKESSIN, Del. — Once a week, Lyn Forester gets down on her knees, clears the cigarette butts, candy wrappers and beer cans away from the base of a stark wooden cross and holds a quiet vigil for her daughter, who was killed here in a car accident eight years ago.
Her ankles dangling from the curb as tractor-trailers hurtle past just feet away, Mrs. Forester says she knows it is both dangerous and illegal to visit this three-foot-wide median along Highway 141 near Wilmington, Del. But she cannot stay away.
"This is where my daughter's spirit was last," Mrs. Forester said, straightening up the plastic flowers and Christmas tree cuttings potted at the base of the shrine for her daughter, Jenni. "I'm more drawn to this spot than I am even to the cemetery where we keep her remains."
Roadside memorials like Mrs. Forester's have become so numerous, and so distracting and dangerous, highway officials say, that more and more states are trying to regulate them. Some, like Montana and California, allow the memorials, but only if alcohol was a factor in the crash. Others, like Wisconsin and New Jersey, limit how long the memorials can remain in place.
Now, in a move that is being watched by other states, Delaware is taking a different approach, establishing a memorial park near a highway exit in hopes of discouraging the roadside shrines. The park will include a reflection pool and red bricks — provided free to the loved ones of highway accident victims — with names inscripted to honor the dead.
Often called "descansos," a Spanish word for "resting places," roadside memorials are most common in the American Southwest. Most researchers believe they descend from a Spanish tradition in which pallbearers left stones or crosses to mark where they rested as they carried a coffin by foot from the church to the cemetery. Because of this heritage, the memorials are protected in New Mexico as "traditional cultural properties" by the state's Historic Preservation Division.
Sylvia Grider, a folklorist and anthropologist at Texas A&M University who has studied the history of the memorials, said their rising popularity in the United States was part of a growing acceptance of public mourning.
"Something happened in American culture when the Vietnam Wall went up and there was an outpouring of offerings in front of it that no one was expecting," Ms. Grider said. "It became more acceptable to express personal grief in these public areas."

-from NY Times. for the full article, visit-
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/national/06shrine.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1226332812-aQEksy2BE4q8ssYG0ZjlUg

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/national/06shrine.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1226332812-aQEksy2BE4q8ssYG0ZjlUg

WINNIPEG - For those grieving the death of a loved one, usually in a traffic accident, a roadside memorial is more than a collection of teddy bears and candles. It's sacred ground. But for many others, the make-shift shrines are eyesores and dangerous distractions that need an expiration date.
The emotional issue of whether time limits should be imposed on public grieving has landed squarely at the door of Canadian municipalities. The Toronto-area suburb of Vaughan has proposed keeping an inventory of memorials and requiring that they be taken down after a year.
Calgary has commissioned an academic study to determine how people feel about the shrines and whether they affect driver behaviour. Officials in Prince Albert, Sask., were criticized this summer for considering a policy that would require a memorial be taken down three months after a person's death.
Now Winnipeg is reviewing the rules about how long remembrances of a departed friend or family member should stay in place. Community discussion boards are abuzz with debates about whether it's appropriate to put candles, crosses and flowers by the side of roads. One blogger has argued that such memorials are a good reminder to drive carefully. Another finds them "distasteful to the max."
The person with the latter view wrote: "I have asked my loved ones to ensure that no such memorial goes up in the event that I die an untimely death. A tombstone in a cemetery somewhere will suffice for me."
Still another voice: "People grieve in their own ways, and it doesn't really hurt me to let them. I'm willing to overlook an eyesore if it's helping someone get over the loss. How selfish is it not to?" -from The Candaian Press. for the full text, visit- http://www.thecanadianpress.com/

http://pruned.blogspot.com/2006/02/roadsidememorialamericacom.html




http://members.tripod.com/jwhiting/descanso19.html



http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/26/america/wyoming.php
Wyoming's State Sponsored Roadside Memorials

LARAMIE, Wyoming: In a small storage shed tucked behind a highway maintenance facility in Wyoming, dozens of monuments to the state's dead motorists lie stacked against one another like discarded props from an old movie set waiting to be used again.
Some are made from wood, others from steel bars or wire, but all the memorials are vestiges of a new statewide effort to remove them from public roads.
"I think they would make a remarkable art exhibit," said Ross Doman, a public liaison officer for the State Department of Transportation, running his hands over a large wooden cross bearing the name of Monte Robbins, who was killed nearly a decade ago on an interstate highway east of Laramie.
Wyoming started enforcing a ban on roadside memorials more than five years ago, after they began appearing so often that transportation officials felt they could distract and obstruct drivers in a dangerous way.

Bob Jaure, a maintenance area supervisor, remembers the midsummer night two years ago when he was called to a gruesome scene along an interstate highway east of the town of Sinclair, in the south-central part of the state. A trucker, Slavik Gutsuliak, had drifted off the road and skidded down an embankment. The truck caught fire and was incinerated before Gutsuliak could escape. A few months later, a charcoal-hued headstone appeared in the median near where Gutsuliak had died. It bore a painting of a youthful face and the words, "We love, we remember, we grieve," inscribed in Russian.
Under the removal policy, the headstone was taken down and has been sitting in the back of a nearby transportation station ever since. A victim's family, in claiming a monument, can then ask the Transportation Department to affix near the crash site a wooden post attached to a small sign of a broken heart and a white dove. The department has offered to put up these public memorials without cost and leave them up for five years, at which point a family can choose to have a new sign erected for a one-time fee of $50.
So far, there have been 282 requests for public memorials, but not everyone agrees that they suffice. Kerry Shatto's son Shane died at the age of 19 in one of the state's most notorious accidents. He and seven other University of Wyoming cross-country runners were killed after a drunken driver plowed into their Jeep Wagoneer on a two-lane highway 17 miles, or 28 kilometers, south of here in 2001. A week later, Shatto built a cross six feet, or more than one meter and 80 centimeters, tall, with the eight runners' first names inscribed. He planted the sign at the site of the accident. Fellow runners strung their sneakers around the cross, others left medals they had won at meets, and the memorial was featured in Sports Illustrated.
Last month, the Transportation Department told Shatto it would be taken down. "I wanted to keep these boys alive in people's minds whenever they went by that spot," Shatto said. "It feels like they're being killed all over again." Shatto, who has since picked up the memorial, said he planned to ask about replanting the cross on private property that abuts the accident site.
Doman, the Transportation Department liaison, said he understood Shatto's grief. He helped pry the cross from the ground. At first, the department had planned to keep the memorials for only six months. Now, it will try to hold on to them until they are picked up, as long as that may be.
"It would be pretty difficult to throw these away," Doman said.

-for the full article, visit -http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/26/america/wyoming.php