Robert Silverman, activist cyclist | “He won everything”

Activist Robert Silverman died last Sunday at the age of 88, after a life largely devoted to the cause of cycling in Montreal. The extent of his legacy to Montreal cyclists is underestimated. Several voices are now being heard calling for the REV Saint-Denis to be renamed in his honor.

Gabriel Beland
The Press

Robert Silverman was already weakened when The Press had met him in 2017 in his apartment in Val-David, where this Montrealer down to his fingertips had retired to enjoy his old age in peace and greenery.

He walked with difficulty, was almost blind.

But that day, he had devoted two hours to us to remember his life as an activist, that of a non-conformist man, who had met Che Guevara and Bob Dylan, then had been in all the fights for the bicycle to have its place. to Montreal.

The man known as “Bicycle Bob” died on February 20 at the age of 88. He was then largely unknown to the general public. His former companions hope that Montreal cyclists will finally be able to pay him the homage that is due to him.

“What are his earnings? He won everything,” says Jacques Desjardins, co-founder with Silverman of the Le Monde à vélo group, in an interview.

Of all the fights

Desjardins remembers the day in 1975 when he went to Silverman’s apartment, in front of Jeanne-Mance Park, for the founding of the group.

“I was a young sovereignist cyclist. We arrive at a meeting, there was a lot of smoke, old bicycles outside and a gang of English-speaking Jewish anarchists. Most of them didn’t speak French, and we spoke English badly. It was two worlds. I often say: the Martians met the Earthlings. »

Alongside Claire Morissette, Robert Silverman will be in all the fights for cycling in Montreal.

According to the charts, the metropolis is often presented as the best cycling city in North America. But at the time, cyclists had no infrastructure in town: no bike paths or parking lots.

“In the 1970s, people who rode bicycles, we all knew them by their first names”, quips the co-creator of the Green Route, Jean-François Pronovost. “When you look at how far we’ve come, the democratization of cycling has been incredible. »

Long before Ferrandez

Coming from a well-to-do Jewish family, Robert Silverman was initially attracted by the leftist ideas that were very fashionable at the time. But quickly, the bicycle appeared to him as a solution to green and transform the city. The death of his ex-wife in a car accident will come to crystallize his disdain for the automobile.

Silverman was never a “bike guy”, a mechanical and lycra enthusiast. “He was getting into anything. He had a three-speed, from memory. He wasn’t pedaling so well,” recalls Jacques Desjardins.

While many Quebec intellectuals had their eyes riveted on France, he was interested in the counterculture in the United States and Europe. He was reading Ivan Illich. He wanted to transform the city through the “vélorution”.

“We dreamed of a car-free city and we thought about what we would put in its place. We imagined the city that, decades later, Luc Ferrandez began to put in place, with wider sidewalks, projections, cycle paths, parks instead of concrete and asphalt, ”recalls Desjardins.

During the first congress of the World by Bicycle, activists draw up a list of demands for cyclists: a north-south cycle path, an east-west cycle path, access to the South Shore by bridges, access to the metro, parking in public places, bike-sharing…

“All of this has been obtained,” notes Desjardins.

The REV Silverman?

Before the arrival of the internet, Silverman was overflowing with ingenuity to attract the attention of the media. He has already been arrested with his hands full of paint, after having drawn a cycle path himself. To request access to the bridges of the South Shore, he had disguised himself as Moses to go “to separate the waters of the St. Lawrence”.

“He was modest, generous, creative, welcoming, eccentric,” says John Symon, who is finishing a biography of Silverman. “Some called it infuriating because he never let go. I don’t think there will be another like him. »

Former Montreal elected official Michel Prescott, who sat from 1982 to 2009, remembers a demonstration “where he was riding his bicycle with a structure around him the size of an automobile”, to denounce the public space taken by the car.

“For a lot of people, it seemed a bit whimsical. But it’s often the case for visionaries and pioneers to initially appear as dreamers,” notes Prescott.

Jacques Desjardins is now campaigning for the REV Saint-Denis to be renamed in his honour. “Bob Silverman never had the consideration he deserved. In the English-speaking world, he is known, but much less in the French-speaking world, ”he believes.

“He should be remembered more than as an environmental leader. His own project was to eliminate the automobile from the city. He did not believe in the Grand Soir or in the sovereignty of Quebec. He believed in cycling. »