Showing posts with label Paris Sport bicycles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paris Sport bicycles. Show all posts

13 July 2017

Bikes From The Night The Lights Went Out

I took Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear, out for a spin this morning. My plan was to finish before the worst of the heat and humidity we would experience this afternoon.  I succeeded at that, and at avoiding the downpour that would end them.

My ride took me through, among other places, the non-hipster parts of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  Believe it or not, they still exist, mainly south of the Williamsburg Bridge and east of Bedford Avenue.  They are, in some ways, time-capsules of what this city was like, say, 40 years ago.

On this date in 1977, one of the most infamous blackouts in history darkened New York City.  Brooklyn's Broadway, which cuts through the borough from the East River to East New York, incurred some of the most serious looting and arson that night in a city that was already suffering from a reputation for anarchy.  

At that time, all of Williamsburg--and much of the rest of this city--bore more resemblance to  today's South and East Williamsburg than it does to the nightlife capital to its north and west.  Hipster-equivalents of that time never would have ventured into such a place:  In fact, about the only young white people to be found were those who were born and raised there and hadn't gone to college, joined the military or gotten out in some other way.   And, perhaps, a few punk-rockers and anti-establishment artists, who are practically the antithesis of hipsters.

You see, in the year Howard Cosell supposedly exclaimed, "The Bronx is Burning!", most residents of neighborhoods like Williamsburg were poor or blue-collar.   If they were white (usually Italian, German or Irish) they weren't young.  Those who were young, or even middle-aged, were likely to be Puerto Rican, Black or Hasidic Jews--like the folks who live in the non-hipster enclaves today.

I saw them on the streets today: the kids running and doing the kinds of things kids do everywhere when school's out.  Their mothers were never more than a few steps away, propped against poles or fences or sitting on stoops in front of the houses.  

Even with the hipsters nowhere to be seen, I saw plenty of bikes.  Some were being ridden, mainly by folks like me who were pedaling through the neighborhood.  Others were chained to parking meters, signposts and other immovable objects.  Ironically, they might have been new--or, at least, not more than a few years old--during the days to which I've alluded, but I probably would not have seen them because, in those days, there were relatively few cyclists in this city, and almost none in neighborhoods like the ones I've mentioned.

I saw this French ten-speed bike from around the mid-1970's as I spun down Franklin Avenue:





Paris Sport was a "house" brand for bikes imported by Park Cycle and Sports of Ridgefield Park, New Jersey.  They were made by several French manufacturers, most commonly Dangre-Starnord, a company based in Valenciennes (a northern French town along the Paris-Roubaix race route) that also sold bikes under the France-Sport and Nord-Star brands.

So it's not surprising that the bike resembles machines from Gitane, Jeunet and Mercier made in that era.  What I found interesting, though, were some of the apparent changes.







The reason this bike caught my eye was the Sun Tour bar end shifters ("Barcons").  One rarely sees them on any bike parked on a New York street, and they certainly were not original equipment on the bike.  More likely, the bike had shifters on the down tube or handlebar stem, and they probably would have been made by Huret, the manufacturer of the "Svelto" derailleur that probably is orignial equipment.




Seeing Weinmann "Vainqueur" centerpull brakes on a French bike is not unusual. However, if you look closely, you will see that the "yoke" that pulls on the straddle cable is not Weinmann's.  This one looks clunkier, and the cable hangers on the steerer tube and seat bolt are thinner than the ones that usually came with Weinmann brakes.  The hangers look like they could be Mafac, but may have been from CLB, whose  brakes and fitments (except for their later "Professional" sidepulls) looked like cruder versions of Mafac's offerings.




I am guessing that someone simply replaced parts as they needed replacing, or simply didn't have the money to do a complete "makeover".  (I mean, what else would explain such good shift levers with such ordinary derailleurs?)  I am also guessing that whoever rides the bike now "inherited" it from somebody and has no idea of what I'm talking about.

The same might be said for this bike parked a few blocks away:





It's the first time I've seen a Royce Union--or, for that matter, any bike with a chainguard like that--in such a color.






It looks like the same model as (or one similar to) the Royce Union three-speed my grandfather gave me about three years before I could ride it. Like my old bike, it was made in Japan.  But the color--and the head tube that could have passed for aluminum if not for the rust spots--reminded me of a bike I often saw a couple of decades later:




The Vitus 979 was, of course, one of the first widely-ridden aluminum frames.  It was available in anodized blue, green, gold, red, purple and the pink shown in the above photo.  As much as I love the other colors, whenever someone mentions the Vitus 979, that rose hue is the first that comes to my mind.




Somehow I doubt that the Royce Union came with such a finish.  I suspect that the bike had once been purple or magenta, or perhaps even red, and had faded--a common fate for the paint on Japanese bikes of the time.

At least it's being used, or looks as if it is, if not by its original owner--who may or may not have lived in the neighborhood the night the lights went out.


26 November 2016

Today's Ride: A Cosmic Connection To Paris Sport?

"All steel to minimize breakage due to varinging (sic) temperature changes in North America."

First of all, as a writer and English teacher, I want to know what is meant by "varinging temperature changes".

I've inferred that whoever wrote "varinging" probably meant "varying".  Now, I know that what we mean by "whine" in America is "whinge" in England.  Hmm...Maybe "varinging" is another Britishism (Does such a word exist?) of which I was unaware.

All right.  If we accept that "varinging" is "varying", then it begs this question:  What in the world does "varying temperature changes" mean?  Are there "unvarying temperature changes" or varying steady temperatures?  

(By the same token, I have always wondered what "close proximity" meant. Is there "far proximity"?)

Anyway...Since I'm bringing up such issues in this blog, you've probably inferred that the italicized passage at the beginning of this post refers to a bicycle--or a bike part.  Actually, the latter is true:  the wordsmith who created that piece of meaningless or misleading (depending on your point of view) copy was referring to a Huret Svelto rear derailleur: a thoroughly unexceptional piece even when it first came out in 1963.

And where did the pointless paen to it that opened this post appear?  It graced the one and only known brochure of one of the many bike brands that came and went during the 1970s Bike Boom in North America.  I am talking about Paris Sport.

Image result for paris sport bicycle
For "varinging temperature changes".

I hadn't thought much about PS in a while.  Today I saw one of their bikes locked to a lamppost when I was out riding and shopping. (I have an excuse for the latter:  I needed a couple of pairs of flat-ish shoes I can dress up or dress down. Really!)  Back in the day, I saw and repaired quite a few of them.  

I'm guessing that if you weren't living in the Northeastern US during the Bike Boom, you may not have seen a Paris Sport.  But in these parts, a number of shops sold them along other popular brands like Peugeot and Raleigh.

The Paris Sport I saw today is like about 90 percent of bikes bearing that brand one would see back when they were popular.  It was a basic French ten-speed, much like those from other Gallic makers of the time.  It had a carbon-steel lugged frame, steel cottered cranks and Weinmann center pull brakes. (Sometimes they came with Mafacs.)  And the derailleur was not atypical, although other French bikes like it were as likely to come with Simplex Prestige derailleurs.

That last fact provides us with a clue to what the writer of the brochure's copy was trying to say without saying.  Those Simplex derailleurs worked well enough when new.  And they would continue to do so as long as the plastic from which they were made didn't wear out or break.  (If you see an early 70s Peugeot UO8 with its original derailleur, it probably wasn't ridden much.)  As to whether the weather had anything to do with its longevity, I don't know.

But there was probably a reason why the writer of that copy didn't take a direct swipe at Simplex derailleurs:  Some Paris Sport models came with them.  At least, they came with the next-highest model of Simplex:  the Criterium.  It's the derailleur that came on the Peugeot PX-10.  It usually had a silver-colored main parallelogram, in contrast to the red one found on the Prestige, which came on the U08.  

Paris Sport was a "house" brand of Victor Cycles (later known as Park Cycle and Sports) in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, just a few minutes away from the George Washington Bridge.  Owner Vic Fraysee and his son Mike, who were racers, had a hand in the development of just about every world-class road racing cyclist the US has produced since the 1960s.  They had a training facility attached to their shop, which served as a kind of community center for local cyclists.  

So, their lineup of Paris Sport bikes didn't include only the kinds of bikes Peugeot, Gitane and other French makers were offering in the United States.  It also included professional-level bikes made in France (usually from Reynolds 531 tubing) and equipped with top-of-the-line French or Campagnolo components.  The Fraysees' shop also housed a custom frame building operation which employed, at different times, Francisco Cuevas (of Spain and Argentina), Pepi Limongi (France) and Dave Moulton (England).

Apparently, bicycles were sold under the Paris Sport name until the mid-1980s or thereabouts, and the Fraysses' shop continued for some time after that.  A shop called "The Cosmic Wheel" has been operating in Park Cycle's old location for the past two decades, but aside from location, there is no connection between the two shops.   These days, Mike Fraysse owns the Burn Brae Mansion, which has served as a location for a few movies and TV episodes.

By the way:  The Paris Sport I saw today didn't have the original Huret Svelto rear derailleur.  It was converted to a single speed.