Serendipities

On any given day--especially in an urban area--one is bound to see a pre-1980 three-speed bike from Raleigh or another English maker.  In fact, I've owned a couple and ridden a few more in my time.

Now I'll show you one that I owned for about three days.  I didn't ride it home, even though I could have. In fact, I rode it only once.

The bike is just like this one--same color and, I believe, even the same size.  But mine was in even better condition when I got it than this one appears to be.

It's, of course, a Raleigh Superbe with a Dynohub generator on the front and a Sturmey-Archer AW 3 speed hub on the rear..  Mine was made in 1956; this one probably came from the Raleigh factory within a year or two of that date.  

The only reason I didn't ride it home is that I found the bike while I was riding down Surf Avenue in Coney Island, near the New York Aquarium.  So I wheeled the bike I'd been riding with one hand, and my new find with the other, onto the D train, which took me to Park Slope, where I was living at the time.

That was about fifteen years ago.  By then, the faded glory of the Coney Island boardwalk had faded; Surf Avenue, like nearly all of the rest of the neighborhood, was as splintered as driftwood and, at night, as desolate as the ocean that stretched from the sand in front of the boardwalk.  

Still, it had a certain charm--though not of the discreet sort of the bourgeoisie.  And, at that time, there were a bunch of semi-abandoned storefronts and warehouses across from Astroland that became impromptu flea markets on weekends.  The men--they were all men--who operated them were even more weathered than the wooden planks on the pier and, if you couldn't read their body language, could be just as treacherous.  

So, with my best poker face, I entered one of those storefronts and, among books and records that were forgotten the day after they were released and clothes that were out of fashion but not yet "vintage" (which wasn't quite hip at that time), I stumbled upon my unexpected treasure.

The old man asked forty dollars for it.  I shuffled around, and pretended to look at his other wares.  "Thirty," he rasped.

"I'll give you twenty."

We settled on twenty-five; if I'd waited a bit longer, I probably would have gotten it for twenty.  

A couple of days later, I rode it to Emey's Bikes, then located on East 25th Street. Although my steed consisted of two road bikes (one of them a tight custom criterium frame) and a hard-tail mountain rig, I was taken with the ride of the Superbe.  However, the shifting wasn't quite right and the Dynohub wasn't working at all.  I was going to ask Emey to work on those things.

He looked like a young  Dick Van Dyke with a pot belly, and talked with E.G. Marshall's voice and Jack Klugman's accent (at least, the one he had in The Odd Couple).  In addition to those qualities, Emey Hoffmann had other eccentricities that were, well, not quite as charming.  Still, the guy knew from Raleigh three-speeds:  People came from out of town to have their vintage Sturmey Archer-equipped bikes serviced.  

After I described the shifting and lighting problems, he asked to ride it.  That didn't surprise me; I used to do the same thing when I was working in bike shops.  

He came back about half an hour later.  "What do you want to do with this bike?"

"Fix the gears--overhaul the hub if you need to.  Same thing with the Dynohub."

"Hmmm..." He puffed on one of the little, unfiltered cigarettes he always smoked.

"Think you can do it?"

He took another puff.  "Wanna make a deal?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'll make you a trade."


"You mean for the repairs?"

"No, for the bike."  

He offered me a mid-level road bike--a Fuji, I think--from the early '80's or thereabouts.  I hemmed.

"Well, what would you like?"  

I glanced toward a Specialized racing bike from around the same time the Fuji was made.  It was a model I knew: I put a couple of bikes just like it together when I worked in Highland Park Cyclery.  

The tomato-red paint had faded only slightly:  The bike hadn't been out much.  The frame was made from a high grade of chrome-moly steel, double butted.  And the components were a combination of Cyclone and Superbe (but not Superbe Pro) parts.  If I remembered correctly, it was the second bike in  Specialized's road bike lineup.  

"Get us a slice of pizza and let me think about it."

One of my favorite pizzerias at that time--Mariella's--was about five blocks from Emey's shop.  I bought a medium pie; 
Emey and I each ate a slice. So did his son, who happened in.  I left the rest "for the house."

He gave me the Specialized racing bike, which I rode home. I thought about keeping it, but a couple of days later one of my riding buddies saw me on it.   The bike was nicer than the one he had; he asked whether I wanted to sell it.

"What's it worth to you?"

He offered three hundred; I asked for five; we settled on four Benjamins.    

I never told him how I got the bike.  Maybe he's reading this now.

Cycling In Traffic: Perceptions Vs. Realities

If you ride your bike to work, someone--a co-worker, a friend or possibly a supervisor--will inevitably ask, "Isn't it dangerous to ride on the streets?"


The short answer I give is, "Well, everything is dangerous on the streets!"  That is true epistemologically and, I suspect, empirically.


The more accurate answer is that doing anything on the streets is dangerous if you're not careful.  Crossing some streets is probably even more dangerous than driving or cycling on them, if you don't pay attention to signals and other things in your surroundings.


Now I think I know why, after so many years, I hear the same question from non-cycling commuters.  An article someone sent me opened with this insight: "A bike accident, unlike a car wreck, tends to live on in the memory even if you didn't see it happen."


I can't count how many times the question about safety is followed by some anecdote about so-and-so's brother or friend who was maimed in a clash between bike and car.  On the other hand, I've never heard anybody tell a friend or co-worker a gruesome story about an auto accident when someone is about to drive somewhere.  


Part of the reason for the discrepancy between bike and car anecdotes, I believe, has something to do with the fact that in most places, we're vastly outnumbered by the number of people who drive their cars to wherever they're going.  Because there are fewer of us, there are fewer bike accidents overall, as well as per capita.  Thus, any story about one of our mishaps stands out and is thus easy to magnify.  And, as Ben Szobody, the writer of the article, points out, anecdotes stay in the mind longer than facts.


More than one study has shown that, statistically, you have less of a chance of getting into an accident, let alone incurring injury or meeting your demise, on two wheels than on four.  Such is even true in South Carolina, where Mr. Szobody reports and which has the second-highest (after Florida) bicycle fatality rate in the US.  


Still, people's fears and stereotypes trump realities.  (That is one reason why there are so many poorly-designed and -constructed bike lanes.)   I guess that is the condition of being a minority, albeit one that is growing.  The best we can hope is , if we can't get more people out of their cars and onto bikes, that we can at least have a motoring population that better understands the realities of being a cyclist.  

Waiting At The Bridge

What do you do when you're riding and have an unexpected roadblock?


Normally, you go around it by taking a slightly different route.  But, sometimes that's just not possible, or feasible. Such was the case when I was crossing back into Queens on the Pulaski Bridge:

Just as I got onto the bike lane, the gate swung shut and warning bells clanged.  This meant, of course, that the drawbridge was about to open.  


It's far from the first time I've encountered a bridge opening when I wanted or needed to ride across it.  At least, today I wasn't really in a hurry. I had moderate time constraints: I'd had to attend to a few things later in the day, so I had to get home, shower and prepare myself.  But I'd budgeted more time than I thought I would need.


The wait for the bridge didn't seem particularly long.  At least, the weather was nearly perfect, and even the normally turbid (and sometimes rancid) waters of the Gowanus Canal were nearly a reflection of serenity as the boat churned through it.


What was interesting about this wait, though, is something you may have noticed in the photo:  I was far from the only cyclist there.  In fact, I can scarcely recall seeing so many other bikes and riders at any other opening of a drawbridge.  As it turned out, there were just as many cyclists, if not more, waiting on the other side of the opening. 


That there were so many cyclists makes sense when you realize that the Pulaski connects what have become two of the greatest concentrations of cyclists in the NYC Metropolitan Area: the neighborhoods of Greenpoint, in Brooklyn and Long Island City in Queens.  I can remember when both of those communities were blue-collar enclaves in which almost nobody rode two wheels.   It seemed that the only time I saw other cyclists, besides myself, in those neighborhoods or on that bridge was when the Five Borough Bike Tour transversed them.


Some of the cyclists I saw today weren't even born then.