He wrote, “I could set my position in time by that moment, like the frozen clock at Hiroshima.” For the next three months, Richard rode his bike almost every day from the Upper West Side to the World Trade Center disaster site, or as near as he could get to it. When he returned home, he wrote about what he had seen.

From his bicycle, Richard could “feel” the smell of water as he pedaled along the Hudson. He navigated through the chaos and uncertainty in the city, and observed the massive mobilization of the rescue effort. The Bicycle Diaries is a very personal account that documents the process of one New Yorker, among 19 million, dealing with the World Trade Center tragedy: from the initial shock through the process of returning to some sense of normalcy.

On the morning of September 11, Gaylord Schanilec sat at his engraving table in Wisconsin working on New York Revisited, a book celebrating the city at the turn of the 21st century. His reaction, like that of most Americans west of the Hudson, was to ask himself, “What can I do?” A week would pass before he was able to contact Kenneth Auchincloss, the author and driving force behind New York Revisited, a book that Gaylord had been commissioned to produce by the Grolier Club of New York. Ken agreed that the tragedy should be acknowledged, but quietly. He felt that to let the tragedy overshadow the original purpose of the book--to celebrate the city, his “home town”--would be unfortunate.

The Bicycle Diaries is, ultimately, the answer to Gaylord’s question, “What can I do?” Each letter, every word, of Richard’s diary has been cast in metal and carefully printed onto the pages of the book.

In the autumn of 2010, Gaylord took a bike ride with Richard along the same streets that Richard had ridden in the autumn of 2001. He too could "feel" the smell of the water along the Hudson as they biked toward the massive construction site where a new One World Trade Center was rising steadily into the afternoon sky. The images in The Bicycle Diaries are based on the photographs Gaylord took that day.