Start Your Bicycles, For 9th Annual Grand Prix

Everyone now knows that New Haven is the pizza capital of the country, Colin Caplan proclaimed at the corner of Chapel and College Streets.

“A little monument” at that same southwestern corner of the Green, meanwhile, ​“suggests we might be the capital of bicycling as well.”

Caplan highlighted that local transportation history Monday afternoon during a press conference celebrating this Friday’s 9th annual New Haven Grand Prix and accompanying apizza fest.

According to Connecticut Cycling Advancement Program (CCAP) Executive Director Brian Wolfe, whose statewide nonprofit hosts the downtown festivities, this year’s Grand Prix will see roughly 250 cyclists compete across eight different races. The group expects more than 15,000 attendees to show up and watch and cheer — and eat lots and lots of pizza, from what Caplan said will be more than 20 pizza vendors, among 50 total food vendors, at the event.

“It’s pizza. It’s beer. It’s bikes,” Wolfe said. What could be better?

The Grand Prix will take place on Friday, Sept. 13 from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., and will see various sections of Chapel, High, and College Streets closed to car traffic from noon to 11 p.m. (Wolfe also said that some of the professional cyclists who participate in Friday’s races will pedal up to speeds of nearly 40 miles per hour. ​“It’s pretty scary,” he said, and also a lot of fun.)

Caplan, a long-time local pizza booster and historian who helped organize a recent New Haven apizza-celebrating trip to the nation’s capital, uplifted New Haven’s bicycling history during his brief time at the mic on Monday.

The stone monument he was referring to is inlaid among the brick walkway by the sidewalk at the Chapel-College corner on the Green.

The monument was first dedicated in 1998, and honors Pierre Lallement, the French inventor who pulled the first patent for a bicycle in November 1866 while living in New Haven.

Entitled ​“The Dawn of Cycling,” the monument’s inscription reads, ​“In July of 1865 PIERRE LALLEMENT left behind his native France for America with the makings of a primitive bicycle in tow. That fall the 22-year-old mechanic settled in Ansonia, about 12 miles west of here. The following April, he rode his invention from that town to this Green where he introduced the art of cycling to the American public. In November, he was awarded a U.S. patent, the world’s first complete specification of a bicycle.”

New Haven is the center of so much ​“invention, ingenuity, art, commerce, culture,” Caplan said with pride. From the 1860s invention of the bicycle to the 2024 New Haven Grand Prix.