NEW YORK — These heroes of the pandemic roll on two wheels.
The city’s delivery cyclists, some 80,000 strong, spent the COVID-19 crisis bringing food to homebound city residents, pedaling groceries to homes across the boroughs and riding to hospitals with meals for overworked first responders as New York City shut down for months.
On Wednesday, a group of 20 delivery cyclists representing their underappreciated ranks will ride through the Canyon of Heroes in the city’s ticker-tape parade honoring all the essential workers who kept the city running at great personal risk.
“They were the only ones in the streets, risking themselves when other people didn’t want to leave the house,” said Glendy Tsitouras, organizer of Los Deliveristas Unidos — a division of the Workers Justice Project. “They were very important. Not just because they kept the economy and restaurant business going, but because they fed the city.”
Tsitouras noted the bikers took to the streets in the spring of 2020, into the winter and back again in the summer of 2021 as the pandemic lingered. They became targets of violence on the eerie and empty city streets, and faced health perils by dealing with strangers who were possibly infected.
“The delivery cyclists didn’t know in that moment if the person who was receiving the order was infected,” she said, adding thefts of the workers’ $2,000 bicycles increased as the workers, riding alone, became easy prey for criminals.
Marcher Elias Hilario Guzman will attend in honor of his brother Victorio Hilaria Guzman, a Mexican immigrant killed last Sept. 23 by a hit-and-run driver in the Bronx.
The parade kicks off at 11 a.m., with 14 floats representing 260 different groups of essential workers honored on the stretch of Broadway usually reserved for sports figures — most recently the U.S. women’s national soccer team in 2019. Other honorees across the decades included U.S. war veterans, astronaut Neil Armstrong and South African leader Nelson Mandela — along with seven World Series-winning New York Yankees teams.
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