New Haven Independent

So began the Fahrenheit 451 “free speech bike tour,” courtesy of the Arts & Ideas Festival/Big Read and Elm City Cycling. It took place on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon made for bicycling — or anything else legal.

In addition to Matthew Feiner (on the left in the photo, of the Devil’s Gear shops) and one of the city’s most stylin’ cycling boosters, leader/organizers included Bill Kurtz and Melissa Vantine.

Although Feiner had to pedal off to another horizon, and didn’t lead this tour, he recalled a personal free speech memory right on this spot: In 1991, he said, he was among some 350 New Haveners arrested for protesting the first Gulf War. “I think we were the first in the nation,” he said, “on this one. And we all demanded a trial to gum up the system.”

Arrested for trespass and blocking corridors to the federal building, Feiner said his charges, and those of all the others, were dropped. “I do remember sharing a cigarette with Bill Dyson in the paddy wagon.”

First stop on the approximate ten-mile loop around free-speech New Haven was the central firehouse at Grand and Olive. Why a firehouse? “Well,” said Kurtz, “there was so much free speech-wise going on at the Green, you don’t want us go ride around it in a circle for two hours, do you?”

Fire History Detour

The fine fire engine thematic connection to Fahrenheit 451 was deemed sufficient by all. So Bill Celentano, the honorary fire department historian — and son of the mid- 20th century New Haven mayor of the same name — regaled a dozen cyclists, such as Bettina Thiel of Woodbridge with how New Haven’s engines became white, but pink first.

It was shortly after World War Two, when Mayor Celentano supported his fire chief Paul Hynes in making New Haven’s equipment not only different but more visible at night. During the war, Celentano and his colleagues explained, the engines traveled with their headlights blacked out, and red was not very visible. So white was approved.

“But the fellow who did the first homemade job painted white over a coat of red, so we had a pink fire engine for a while.” Not for long.

A fire history buff and more, Celentano functions as the walking, talking fire department history museum. “I lobbied the mayor to turn historic Firehouse 12 on Crown Street into our museum, but he said he wanted something more upscale there.”

The music club there has nicely fit the bill, Celentano agreed. Then he rued this fact: “Do you know we have located an original Westinghouse-made, combined horse [to pull the wagon] and gasoline [to power the pump] fire apparatus that was used in New Haven in 1909? It’s in storage in Massachusetts, it’s been given to us, but we don’t have any place to put it in the city. Any ideas?”

Amistad

The cyclists, such as recumbent trike builder and rider Merrill Gay of New Britain (pictured standing before a fire investigation van) tried a few. The New Haven Library and Museum? (“I asked Bill Hosley, said Celentano, “but he doesn’t have room”). Then with gratitude and good wishes for where to house his apparatus, they rode off to the next free speech stop: the reproduction of the Amistad, which had just put Saturday morning in at Long Wharf after its year-long circumnavigation of the Atlantic to mark the 200th anniversary of the end of cross-Atlantic slave trade.

Although most of the original crew had dispersed, tours were being given and high fives offered all around. Bill Pinkney, emeritus captain of the Amistad and the only black man to sail solo around the world, filled in a detail on the famous 1839 Amistad case a reporter had not known:

“You want to know why former president John Quincy Adams got involved?” Apparently it was for reasons other than or in addition to a belief that the Africans were, legally speaking, not property, but humans. “It’s because Martin van Buren had placed his own judge on the case, and Adams was outraged that the president had overstepped the powers of his branch of government!”

Suffragists

Casting an ever-wider net of freedoms to celebrate, the cyclists paid homage to a firefighters’ memorial in the middle of beautiful Evergreen Cemetery off the Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. They then made their way to Maya Lin’s “Women’s Table” sculpture, marking the admission of women to Yale, on the quad before Sterling Memorial Library.

Bill Kurtz said that not far from this site, in 1869, Susan B. Anthony and Isabella Beecher Hooker (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe), formed the Connecticut Suffrage Association. They were denied the vote at the Connecticut State House at that time, which was then housed in what is now the Yale dorm at the College and Chapel intersection. The women or their descendants came back and won the vote, in 1899 — as long as the women’s vote was restricted to the school board. Still it was a step towards full franchise.

Finally, the plaza in front of the Beinecke Rare Book Library was reached. “When they start burning the books,” said Kurtz, “they’ll start here, because the Beinecke has the best stuff. “

“The librarian I talked to,” said the free-spirited Kurtz, “actually didn’t believe me when I told him several dozen sweaty cyclists would indeed be interested in looking at your Gutenberg Bible.”

Recumbent trike rider Gay remembered that on this site, 22 years ago, there were demonstrations against the university’s investments in apartheid-era South Africa. “They didn’t do it because of the books,” he said, “but because the president’s house is nearby.”

Gay hadn’t been there, but a girlfriend had. She told him, and he remembered, and now others would too.

There are a few more of these splendid bicycle tours left during the last week of the Arts & Ideas festival, including one Wednesday night that Bill Kurtz is helping to lead to Lighthouse Point. For the full schedule — including a “century,” that is the 100-mile ride on June 28, the last day of the festival — click here.