Pittsburgh Pedal Express / 2007

Photograph Annie O'Neil / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Ally Reeves and I created a free bicycle mail delivery service called the Pittsburgh Pedal Express.  We built a wooden mailbox and on it inscribed instructions that read: “Write a letter to someone in Pittsburgh, drop it in our box and we will deliver it by bicycle. If you don’t know the exact address, then just get us in the general area.” We set up the mailbox at the Three River’s Arts festival in June. In two weeks time we received 300 letters and immediately began delivering them.

I was surprised by how excited people were to receive a handwritten letter. We have met so many diverse and interesting people on our routes. One person was so enthused that he invited me in to have dinner with his family. We have also had a terrific excuse to wander around the city and discover new paths and neighborhoods that we would have never before discovered.  

As we were finishing the main deliveries, Diana Nelson Jones from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and photographer Annie O’Neil followed us around on our routes. They assembled both a newspaper article and a video documentary of our project. These include the practical aspects of the project as well as interviews with reipients of the letters.

Click here for the Post-gazette story titled “Mail On Wheels”

Click here to see the video.

 

"The nature of the whole thing was wonderful. The process itself makes one take a pause. It's a very directly connected, human wonderful thing." A letter is even more personal today because of e-mail, he said. The time it took for Zachary's letter to arrive, he said, "was, I think, a thoughtful, aesthetic strategy."

On one delivery, I was became fascinated by the nature of memory and how the sender of this letter remembered that the recipient’s building had geometric windows, but they drew them in reverse. There was something quite uncanny about the relationship between the letter and reality.

“We said that we would deliver the mail as soon as possible. Which is a sort of a ‘Pony Express’ style timeline where the mail’s gonna get there as soon as we can take it. It’s dependent on everything from weather to energy levels…”

“I think we’re both interested in exploring our assumptions about what an exhibition has to be or what art has to be. The exhibit is really the making of this thing, and then the performance of it, the experience of it and the documentation of it become a totally new entity all together.”

“We’re hoping to inspire wonder and magic in the world…where technology is good at making things accessible, but some of our senses are getting neglected.”