In celebration of the city’s upcoming Tricentennial, NolaVie and New Orleans Historical bring you the series Who Did it Better? New Orleans Then and Now . In it, we look at offbeat aspects of the city’s history and their parallels in the present. Today we give you: Big Easy Bikes. Call it a story about recycling. New Orleans has seen quite the influx of bicyclers in the past decade. But the bike crowd is not new to the city. The high-wheel bicycle debuted in the U.S. in 1879, and New Orleans