The Vision …

The Pedaling History Bicycle Museum would like to relocate its collection to the Erie Canal Harbor and re-establish bicycling heritage within a new structure, on the original footprint of the George N. Pierce & Company bicycle manufacturing building, that will evoke the original look and feel of what was once within the historic street grid of the Erie Canal Harbor.

The Master Plan for the Erie Canal Harbor Project provides a vision that the “Erie Canal Harbor will be a dynamic year-round site that celebrates Buffalo's local history and role in our nation's growth and development.” The re-creation of this site has been identified to take on a historic preservation approach providing an interpretive landscape that conveys the significance of the canal district and a realistic impression of its physical character.

Within the Erie Canal Harbor Project, incorporation of the historic street pattern and capitalization on transportation related tourism through the preservation and interpretation of historic elements such as original building foundations and a transportation related industry, Pedaling History Bicycle Museum can make a strong case for its re-location to the Erie Canal Harbor.

Buffalo, New York was, in the 1890's, a major producer, promoter and user of early bicycles. With over a hundred different makes of bicycles made in and around the city, Buffalo may well have been the third largest region of bicycle manufacturing in America during the golden age of cycling in the 1890s. One of the largest manufacturers of bicycles in Buffalo was the George N. Pierce Company on Hanover Street; this was also where they built their first Pierce automobiles, the forerunner of their renowned Pierce-Arrow automobile. The original location of the George N. Pierce manufacturing building is identified within the Erie Canal Harbor Master Plan as development parcel 4, only steps away from the Erie Canal's original Terminus and the current restoration site of the Commercial Slip.

Currently located in Orchard Park, NY, for the past fifteen years Pedaling History Bicycle Museum has been an established world-class museum and has become an important educational resource and attraction for the world. The museum exhibits a collection of over 400 historic and rare bicycles along with thousands of pieces of bicycling memorabilia, ephemera and advertising, photographs, posters and original manufacturers' catalogs. Ninety-five percent of this collection is original American Heritage artifacts telling the beginning of our personal mechanical transportation as we were weaned from the horse. Nearly twenty percent of the museum's collection is of Western New York and Buffalo origination. The Pedaling History Bicycle Museum is the largest collection of American Bicycling History in the world and is globally recognized as such, enjoying also a significant strong internet presence. The museum's presentations mix machines with social impact offering a chronological and comprehensive history profiling the bicycle as the catalyst leading to all of the personal transportation choices we all enjoy today, the bicycle influence on women's emancipation, and also dispelling today's common thought of it as just a children's recreation pastime. It was the tremendous surge of bicycle patents during the last two decades of the 19 th Century that pioneered all of the twentieth century transportation we enjoy today and Buffalo played an important role it.