San Francisco. Union square. Man on bike

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The second club nationally and the first on the west coast was the San Francisco Bicycle Club, founded on December 13, 1876. They petitioned the Park Commission for permission to ride their new-fangled devices in Golden Gate Park. Overcoming their astonishment that there was actually a club for wheelmen, the park commissioners allowed them to “enter Golden Gate Park at the Stanyan Street entrance to the South Drive before 7 a.m. only.” Intensive self-policing kept the wheelmen within the bounds of the concession, and before too long the “privileges were extended.” (“When San Francisco Was Teaching America to Ride a Bicycle,” by Ida L. Howard, San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 26, 1905) But it was in the next decade that bicycling began its precipitous take-off.