The Baby Carriage Blockades
Tags: Transportation, New York City, Vision Zero, Protest, Amsterdam

The Baby Carriage Blockades

Beginning in 1914, New York City designated some streets as “play streets,” where children could roam freely. These were cordoned off to motor traffic, but trucks were permitted in to make local deliveries. On Valentine’s Day 1949, a truck driver drove his coal truck into a play street in largely Hispanic East Harlem to make an early afternoon delivery. Two girls, Carmelita Rodriguez and Maria Rodriguez (unrelated), both ten years old, were on their lunch hour from Public School 121. They strode out of a store with the candy they had just purchased, confident in the safety of the play street. The truck driver struck them with his vehicle, killing them both.[6] The next day, local residents formed a “parent and baby-carriage blockade,” stopping and turning back all delivery vehicles. According to a reporter, 100 women participated to protect the children. New York Daily News photos show a diverse population of protesters. Speaking for the blockaders, Mary di Stefano, president of the Parents’ Association of P.S. 121, told the press: “They’ll have to kill us to get through here.” On the following day, parents set up a second picket one block north. The demonstrators extracted a concession: the city would close the play street to delivery vehicles on weekdays at the hours when children were walking to and from school, including the lunch hour.[7]

This 1949 demonstration was not the first of its kind, but it appears to have been the first to be dubbed a “baby carriage blockade.” It bears much in common with typical traffic safety demonstrations of its era: most of the participants were women, in the company of their children. Their demand was primarily a plea for child safety, but without depriving children of their use of the streets. The demonstrators did not object to cars’ preeminence in their city; they merely wished to keep residential streets safe. They did not demand playgrounds so that children would not need streets; they demanded streets safe for children.

Demonstrations like this one were common in the 1950s and 60s, but gradually declined in frequency and scale thereafter. The decline coincided with suburbanization, a falling birthrate, and smaller families, but it also signaled the ascendancy of the now-preferred path to child traffic safety: the two-car family, the fenced playground, parental chauffeuring of children, a surrender to car dependency regardless of the costs or family income, and the abandonment of children’s independent mobility. Where streets were unsafe for children, the problem became the mother’s responsibility, and an injury or a death was seen as the mother’s fault.

When they were common, the protests remained isolated local affairs, with no national cohesion. Press interest was local only. But the era of the baby carriage blockades is a reminder that Americans of all classes resisted cars’ predominance and did so in decades we now recall as the height of car culture. These persistent and vocal protests give us cause to doubt that the Stop de Kindermoord movement in the Netherlands is too alien from the American experience to serve as a useful model. Indeed, Americans were engaging in Stop de Kindermoord demonstrations of their own long before the Dutch movement of that name.[8]

The U.S. and the Netherlands are unmistakably distinct cases. But we need not let exaggeration of the differences, influenced by motordom’s version of America’s car history, prevent us from learning from the Dutch example. Mark Wagenbuur of the blog Bicycle Dutch was one of the sources of the rediscovery of Stop de Kindermoord among English speakers. In his 2011 blog post and video about the Dutch movement, Wagenbuur concluded: “the Netherlands’ problems were and are not unique, their solutions shouldn’t be that either.”[9]

[This article first appeared in Transportation Alternatives’ Vision Zero Cities Journal in 2019.]