On This Day in 1899, a Car Fatally Struck a Pedestrian for the First Time in American History

When Henry Hale Bliss, a pedestrian described on the plaque that stands in his memory as “a New York real estate man,” was struck by a passing taxicab in Manhattan on the evening of September 13, 1899, the New York Times reported that he “was so seriously injured that he could not live.” This prediction proved prescient. Bliss succumbed to his injuries the following day, becoming the first American in history known to have been fatally struck by an automobile. Today, the 69-year-old is recognized as the first casualty in an ongoing conflict that has reshaped the United States’ urban centers: the battle between pedestrians and drivers.

Bliss wasn’t the first pedestrian victim of an automobile accident. That title goes to Bridget Driscoll, an Irish woman who was struck on the grounds of London’s Crystal Palace in August 1896. Neither was Bliss the last traffic fatality. According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, the number of pedestrians killed by drivers reached a four-decade high of more than 7,500 in 2022 and remained significantly above pre-pandemic levels in 2023.

But that’s a world removed from the one Bliss once knew. Though reliable data about the number of walkers killed annually by vehicles prior to the 1910s is tough to come by, pedestrian fatalities were hardly uncommon in late 19th-century New York City. In that era, trams, horse-drawn carriages and bicycles shared the pavement with pedestrians. Streets were still regarded the way they had been for centuries, as public spaces in which people and animals could move about freely in any direction they chose.

When travelers on foot, especially elderly people and young children, found themselves in the path of vehicles, the results were often tragic. Then, in the second decade of the 20th century, the widespread adoption of the automobile made urban streets even more hazardous, says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia who examined humans’ love-hate relationship with cars in his 2008 book, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.

As the popularity of cars exploded, officials charged with keeping order in cities stood firm in their view that pedestrian safety was the responsibility of the motorist, much like it was with carriage drivers.

“Every time, the judge would say, ‘A pedestrian has no obligation to watch out for motor vehicles; it’s the motor vehicle operator’s responsibility to watch out for them,’” Norton explains. “This is Anglo-American common law tradition that says the street is a public space. Everybody’s entitled to use it, provided they don’t endanger others or unduly inconvenience others. [That] put the burden of responsibility on the driver, because the pedestrian is not endangering anyone else, but the driver is.”

A disproportionate fraction of the city dwellers hit by cars were young children—a fact that contributed to public sympathy landing overwhelmingly on the side of the many traveling on foot rather than the relatively few behind the wheel.

“It’s this intense blame,” Norton says. “The blame is in the New York Times. It’s in all the other newspapers of the country. You can see it on the editorial pages. The editors are hostile to drivers. The letters to the editor are overwhelmingly hostile to drivers. Judges are hostile to drivers. And this makes it very difficult to drive in a city.”

By the 1920s, a coalition had formed among those with a vested interest in seeing motor vehicles move through cities unimpeded: for example, automakers, trucking and taxi companies, and the American Automobile Association (better known today by the acronym AAA). The group’s initial response, Norton says, was to lend its voice to the chorus calling for drivers to be cautious. But when actual legislation began to be discussed—such as banning motor vehicles in certain pedestrian-dense areas or calling for cars to have devices installed on their engines that would prevent them from exceeding a set number of miles per hour—the car lobby changed course in a hurry.

In 1923, a ballot initiative in Cincinnati proposed installing a speed limiter on vehicles kept in the city. The measure didn’t pass, but 42,000 people signed their names to a petition to get it placed on the ballot. “That really got the attention of the automobile people,” Norton says. “They had an absolute panic attack about that, and they never went back to the old way of just joining in the safety demands after that.”

A century ago, very few city dwellers truly needed cars for commuting or daily tasks. In the days before traffic congestion, cars were simply faster than public transit. Anything that interfered with that speed would deprive the industry of a selling point. So the automotive lobby decided it needed to counter the presumption that cars were inherently dangerous, that motorists were risk takers and that pedestrians were blameless. Norton points to a comment made by Chicago Motor Club President Charles Hayes in 1926 as a harbinger of the new approach: “The day of the emotional sob sister campaign is over.”

“By that,” the historian explains, “he meant we’re going to make the old safety message look emotional. We’re going to associate it with mothers, with hysterical women, and we will frame ourselves as the authoritative, scientific men who are cool, rational, methodical and research-based.”

This framing dominated considerations of walkability in cities for more than half a century. Jaywalking pedestrians, not careless car drivers, received the blame for traffic fatalities. While Norton has documented the prevalence of “baby carriage blockades”—demonstrations organized mainly by mothers—in American cities between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, pedestrian advocates spent those same years losing the messaging war to the motor lobby.

The notion that most Americans needed a car to get to work or complete their daily tasks was an idea that pro-car forces worked very hard to promote. Daily driving in general was uncommon until the 1950s. Until the 1960s, Norton points out, about half of American women of legal driving age never obtained driver’s licenses—a fact the pro-automotive forces exploited in their campaign to paint pedestrian safety advocates as busybodies and worrywarts who just didn’t understand the science of traffic. “It was very condescending,” Norton says.

“By the 1960s,” wrote Smithsonian magazine in 2014, “cars had become so dominant that when civil engineers made the first computer models to study how traffic flowed, they didn’t even bother to include pedestrians. … As pedestrians, Americans may have feared [cars’] dangers—but as drivers, they loved the mobility.”

Given the automobile lobby’s later emphasis on pedestrian culpability, one element of the 1899 Times account of Bliss’ death leaps out: The vehicle that struck him is described as “an automobile in charge of Arthur Smith of 151 West 62nd Street”—phrasing that places responsibility squarely on the driver’s shoulders.

According to the Times, Bliss was hit just after stepping off of a southbound trolley car at the intersection of Central Park West and 74th Street. As he turned to assist a fellow passenger with the step down to the street, the electric cab struck him—a case of one modern convenience of transportation, the trolley, being pitted against another, the automobile. The newspaper recounted Bliss’ injuries in notably graphic detail, reporting that he “was knocked to the pavement, and two wheels passed over his head and body. His skull and chest were crushed.”

The cab’s passenger, a physician whose father had previously served as the mayor of New York City, called for an ambulance as soon as the vehicle came to a standstill. “Until its arrival, [he] did all he could to aid the injured man,” the Times noted. The driver, meanwhile, was arrested and charged with manslaughter.

The report’s final sentence hinted that Bliss’ demise would not be an isolated incident: “The place where the accident happened is known to the motormen on the trolley line as ‘Dangerous Stretch,’ on account of the many accidents which have occurred there during the past summer.” Indeed, just over a decade after Bliss’ death, in 1910, automobiles killed more than 100 pedestrians in New York City. Two years later, in 1912, that figure doubled to 221 fatalities. Reflecting on the death toll, the Times wrote, “No man is ever likely to forget the first violent death he witnesses. The huddled form of what once was a man, amid the mud and filth of the street, makes an ineffaceable impression.”

Chris Klimek | READ MORE

Chris Klimek is a writer and former podcast host for Smithsonian.