The Third annual conference of the Automotive Historians Australia will be held 11-12 August 2018 at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne.
Focus is, AUTOPIA: the car and the modern city.
I will be presenting a paper on: Early Automotive Contests in Urban America.
During the formative years of motor sport in the United States, roughly considered as the first quarter century or from 1895 to 1920, many of the automotive contests that took place in the United States did so in or near urban or suburban settings. Whether road races, hill climbs, races on oval tracks, speed trials or tours and reliability trials, many of these early events were set in or near urban and suburban communities. The purpose of this presentation is to provide an overview of these events and to draw attention to their urban and suburban locales.
Not generally considered as one of the founts of American automobile racing, the New York City region witnessed track racing at Brighton Beach on Coney Island, Empire City in Yonkers, Morris Park in the Bronx, and Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, speed trials on Staten Island and on Jamaica Boulevard, hill climbs on St. George Hill and across the Hudson in Orange, New Jersey, not to mention the Vanderbilt Cup on Long Island venturing into Queens.
The Fairmount Park events in Philadelphia attracted up to 250,000 spectators. Board tracks were located within the suburban communities of cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Omaha. The daily route of the Glidden Tour, the first event to feature the checkered flag, was from town to town. The Vanderbilt Cup and the American Grand Prize events were held in locales such as suburban Savannah and Milwaukee within cities such as San Francisco and Santa Monica.
That so many of these early automotive contests in America were held in urban or suburban settings is often overlooked. This paper will attempt to draw attention to this interesting aspect of the spatial relationship between the automobile and the urban environment.
