Led by its president Charlie Komanoff, Transportation Alternatives immediately took the bike ban to court — while in the streets, a coalition of commuters, recreational cyclists, and bike messengers, led by a charismatic courier named Steve Athenios, protested the ban with twice-weekly traffic-slowdowns: bikes spread across 6th Avenue, blocking all other vehicles and rolling downtown at a snail’s pace.

“That’s Steve Athenios speaking to a crowd of messengers in the little park on the corner of Houston and Sixth Avenue. I must have been standing on the seat of my tricycle to get that high angle. Athenios could really get those guys going.”

“Mayor Koch had been testing the bikers, who had never been able to organize much of anything before,” says Hultberg, who demurs his role in it all. “When the City saw the coordination on the streets of the pro-bicyclists, it made him realize this was a constituency that wasn’t going away.”

Five weeks after the ban was announced, a judge overturned it on a technicality. But Mayor Koch, having seen the organized power of the city’s cyclists, made no effort to try again.