Bikes in New York

I don't think I've ever written about my bike blog on here before.



I moved to New York at the end of August 2006, and Laura and I walked all over the place every spare moment we had during the weekends. I noticed myself taking lots of pictures of the bikes I saw, so I started a Flickr set for them all. (My initial interest in bikes was prompted by a dream I had had that summer, in which I owned a shiny yellow three speed.)



The posts, predictably, are much more frequent when the weather is nice. This explains why I got excited this past Saturday when I noticed my first bike since New York started to give us a hint of the spring and summer ahead.



It made me think of all the things I'm excited about in the upcoming few months, and it made me remember the time I had searching for a new bike this time last year. I knew very little, and only had an idea of what I thought I wanted. Alex talked about single speeds, Clay sketched a history of frames out, I went to stores and read everything I could. Eventually, I found the perfect, perfect bike, and didn't care if everybody and their best friend in my neighborhood had the exact same one. After months of test riding bikes that felt like I was going to break my neck, this one felt like walking. The rest of the summer was magic.



The bikes I like the most typically give me a craving for a specific food; I don't know if that's a weird manifestation of my mild synaesthesia, or if I just like eating. Here are 2 examples:

This one made me want Hot Tamales -


This one made me want birthday cake -


Anyway. If you like looking at nice bikes, maybe you'll like the blog. If you're a serious bike nerd who takes bikes apart for fun and knows what kind of frame makes what degree turns, maybe you'll be bored ;)

Urban Outfitters custom bikes

Most of the emails I get from Urban Outfitters look like words cut out of construction paper with some glitter thrown in. That in itself is not a problem, but usually if a clothing store sends me emails, I kind of want to see clothing in them – something other than the fact that I got an email has to make me want to click on it.

That's why I thought the imagery in today's email was of the "lifestyle photography /aesthetics" variety. Looking a bit closer, though, I noticed that Urban now has a bike store.


They have nice, candy-like colors, and a few different parts on the bikes that you can apply them to. I spent the next few minutes wasting my time designing one:


Which is pretty cool, since it kept me on their site longer than they ever have with any other email. I have been playing with the idea of being in the market for a bike (I love my own, but it is SO heavy and unwieldy), and this helped me think a little bit about the stuff I should take into consideration, should that idea ever become a reality.

If someone were to want to go all out with customization, this may not be the best place to go: you only seem to be able to get one kind of frame, one style of handlebars, one type of seat, etc. On the other end of the spectrum is Mission Bicycle Company, which lets you customize a bike so incredibly much that you are out of luck if you don't know a ton about how bikes work:


So maybe the Urban Outfitters bike shop isn't for a hyper serious cyclist, or one who isn't as picky about building a bike with options in a million different places. It's kind of build-a-bike for beginners, if you will. And you know what, there's nothing wrong with that... it actually kind of fits with how I perceive the brand. I – as pretty much everyone else – have had some issues with Urban Outfitters in the past, but this is one of the more interesting things I've seen them do lately.