Many good stories end with a hangover. This story begins with one.
Some months ago while it was snowing on the East Coast, I woke up with a pounding headache in Austin, Texas. The courtyard of my friend Jon’s South Congress Street apartment hosted several crapemyrtle trees, and in turn these trees held what sounded to me like several million myna birds attempting to mate. I eventually gave up trying to sleep through the cacophony and started the range to boil water for the coffee that would fuel the long day ahead. I had traveled to the Lone Star state to attend NAHBS, a tradeshow celebrating the industry that revolves around the handmade bicycle, and the night before I found myself out late with friends from all over the country, toasting the growing interest in this craft at the open-air bars along 6th Street.
The 7th annual North American Handmade Bicycle Show hit Texas the last weekend of February and untanned arms and legs accompanied the relieved smiles of those of us who had left the seemingly infinite winter weather behind. Exhibitors and attendees crowded the Austin Convention Center and its immediate environs with carefully-planned display booths, constantly-clicking cameras, piles of schwag, oohing, ahhing, occasional hipster snarkiness, and because it was a tradeshow and because it was a lovely spring weekend in Austin, plenty of beer drinking and taco truck dining. Oh, and there were beautiful handcrafted bicycles everywhere.
The American bicycle industry as most people think of it- workers crafting Treks and Schwinns in Midwestern fabrication shops- has been dead for decades. The vast majority of bicycle frames and components produced nowadays are outsourced to mechanized megafactories in Taiwan and the Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces of China. For the most part, bicycle design is now performed in well-lit suburban office buildings and the actual construction occurs tens of thousand of miles away by massive automated equipment and anonymous underpaid laborers.
In many ways, this is a good thing. It means cheap and plentiful bicycles for a world running out of space, clean air, and oil. It means profitability and longevity for the bicycle companies, their shareholders, their distributors, and their retailers. But it also means that the daily companion that many cyclists come to see as one of their most intimate friends has come into the world without individuality or soul, and possibly with devastating global socioeconomic consequences. This is where the handmade bicycle comes in.
When an object of consumption can be produced in such a way that its tolerances and dimensions and phenotypical behavior can be rigidly defined and controlled, why return to a method of production that introduces so many uncertainties? The current world of framebuilding is not obsessed with reproducing the exactitude of machine-made bicycle frames. Rather, it is a realm defined by difference and unrepeatability- feats of sculpture and obsessive detail work that can feasibly be done but once, the minute influences an extra cup of coffee can have upon the gestation of a design, anecdotes of experiences and exhilaration that get told to and by the builder and rider-to-be that get folded and filed into the frame and reverberate within its hollow spaces.
NAHBS is a show about bicycles as unique objects. Frames made from various types of steel, titanium, aluminum, assorted carbon fiber composites, bamboo, and wood were on display and their builders proudly stood beside them to engage the attendees and tell the stories that accompanied each bicycle’s process of creation and their own path into what could broadly be considered an anachronistic vocation. The convention center was packed to the gills with people who imagine hell as a world filled with disposable Ikea-stuffs. Bicycle framebuilders and their customers tend to be folk who think that matter has meaning, and the way in which we produce, consume, and use objects defines who we are as a people.
This subculture suffers (or benefits) from the same unusual side-effects as people in love and the highly religious- the objects of their adorations becomes powerful things that direct their behavior and control their emotions, causing them to give up steady jobs in order to spend long days and nights wrangling metal stock or two-part epoxy into gleaming sleek velocipedes. The unique wanderings, signs of use and interaction, and the resultant morphogenetic imprint that these handmade bicycles leave throughout their existence create a bond between maker, machine, and user, and the historiographies of this path are the collected stories and relationships that their owners and riders seek to intertwine themselves with.
In all of this there can exist a certain fetishization of the bicycle. The romance of the solo rider cresting thin-air passes, the glory and drama of the racing circuits, the nostalgia for the pit hearth frameshops of yesteryear, the poetry of the simple translation of human effort into surprising forward velocity; bicycle culture has always been steeped in a certain dreaminess and grandeur. As contemporary urbanites rediscover the bicycle as a tool for defying the constraints of our Eisenhowered cities and our codependent affair with the automobile, we are seeing a resurgent interest in the cultural aura of bicycles along with the other more familiar localism movements. In the same way CSAs, urban farms, cornershop clothiers, and local booksellers take on amazon.com and the big-box megamarts, so have men and women that make frames by hand challenged the global supply chains of the large bicycle corporations for their three-sizes-fits-all design philosophies and green-washed ad-speak. However, in the same way that the purchase of organic locally-grown micro-greens can serve as a status symbol and a sign of eco-savvy affluence, there is at the moment a very present financial and cultural entry barrier into the world of handmade bicycles. Luckily, it may be in Boston that these boundaries begin to break down.
You see, the history of the Boston bicycle culture and industry is quite rich and progressive. In the late 19th century, Boston claimed the first US bicycle race, the first US bicycle club, and the first US bicycle manufacturing company. Throughout the early 20th century, Massachusetts served as a fount of bicycle industry and innovation, leading the country in production and advocacy movements, and MIT researchers toiled to develop better roadbuilding technologies in order to make cycling more comfortable and accessible to all.
The 1980’s saw several small bicycle companies springing up in the Boston area, Fat City Cycles (Somerville) and Merlin Metalworks (Cambridge) being the most notable, to lead the way within the newly-developing mountain bike scene. The fallout after the demise of those two companies in the 90’s brought us Independent Fabrications (Somerville), Seven Cycles (Watertown), and A.N.T. Bicycles (Holliston), and the direct tertiary generation of builders has grown to include Geekhouse Bikes (Allston), Firefly Bicycles (Readville), Icarus Frames, Royal H Cycles, and Saila Bicycles (all in Somerville). This diverse family of the original Boston handbuilt scene decedents is joined by a plethora of old and new torchbearers: Quiros Cycles (Natick), Peter Mooney Cycles (Belmont), Budd Bike Works (Medford), Igleheart Frames (Wenham), Erba Bamboo Bicycles (Boston), Hot Tubes, Maietta Cycles (both in Shirley), and likely dozens of others mitering tubes and relearning high school trig in garages and basements across the metro.
What this incredible density and diversity of builders means for we fortunate Bostonians is: more innovation, more cross-pollination, and most importantly, more bikes for more people, with prices that are becoming more and more affordable and designs that serve a broader segment of the populous. Considering the (rightly so) skyrocketing prices of fossil fuel and the cumulative social and environmental costs of landfill consumerism, a custom bicycle frame is a purchase that underscores an individual’s commitment to personal and ecological sustainability as well as an investment in a deeper connection to the material world we inhabit.
I guess this brief narrative does indeed end with a hangover, too. Thinking about bikes and NAHBS brought to mind a vignette about the collective malaise we so-called-post-industrialites are experiencing after the last century of binge consumption. As we celebrate the world of easily-available goods, we sometimes find in our exuberance little pockets of emptiness that indicate a missing connection to the world of objects we have created. There is a thread of transgenerational craft, individual ingenuity, and a complex tethering to the material that trails all the way back to the original human emergence from the East African savanna and the first innovative users of opposable thumbs and swollen neocortexes. Some of those who feel its tug now find themselves hefting hand files and breathing acetylene fumes, making utilitarian works of art for which they see no determinate end of use; only an indefinite life of long roads, hidden paths, potholes in shadow-crossed streets, and the strain of a human being moving under its own power though an imperfect inherited environment, seeking and perhaps almost finding a completeness.
Check out Eric's pics from NAHBS here on the Phoenix site.
prguitarman
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
kaledo-art
areudirty
annaxmalina
