By Josh Moody<\/p>\n
Have you ever noticed how many bikes there are at the Project? Ever been to a Smart Partner Picnic and rode down to the piers with the whole group, looking like a weird, kid invasion stage of the Tour de France? Have you ever gone into George\u2019s shop in the back, looked around and thought, \u201cHold the foam core phone! There are as many bike tools in here as there are carpentry tools!\u201d? Ever joined a Project kid for a spin on our tandem bike, The Watermelon? Or even if you\u2019ve only been to our shows, I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve looked to the right as you enter our building, seen a half dozen bicycles hanging on the wall and thought to yourself, \u201cAre there even enough staff members to ride all these things? What is the DEAL?\u201d Well, I know how you feel. Let me tell you the story of my introduction to the biking culture of The 52nd Street Project.<\/p>\n
I used to hate bikes. Honestly, hate them. When I was in college, my best friend was an aspiring pro cyclist. He took it very seriously: owned three bikes; trained constantly; wore the extremely uncomfortable (for him and anyone who saw him bike by) spandex onesies, and as a result, naturally, I mocked him mercilessly. \u201cDude,\u201d I\u2019d say, \u201cYour car\u2019s missing wheels, motors, tail pipes, headlights, efficiency, modern science, coolness, and you\u2019re dressed like you\u2019re coming from some sort of super intense modern dance class that requires a helmet and a butt pad\u2026 also you\u2019re too skinny, eat something.\u201d But try as I might to crush his passion, my friend kept right on riding, and loving every minute of it. I just didn\u2019t get it.<\/p>\n
Upon graduating from college, I decided to move to New York City, and by some strange and magical stroke of luck, I got myself a job working at the coolest place on this or any other planet, The 52nd Street Project. And to my amazement, despite living in a city with one of the oldest and most extensive (and yeah fine, also gross, weird, stinky, sticky, ratty, annoying, and on some routes almost non-existent, yeah, I\u2019m looking at you G train) public transportation systems ANYWHERE, several of my new coworkers biked to work. Every day! Biked I tell you! Rain or shine! On BIKES! And I\u2019m not even talking motorbikes here, I\u2019m talking man-powered, leg pumping, basically running but with wheels, bicycles.<\/p>\n
I was shocked, but also more than a little humbled. Here were respectable, successful and happy adults, STILL choosing the prehistoric vehicle preferred by my silly friend from college. \u201cWhat am I missing?\u201d I thought to myself. Well, more than ready to read my mind and answer that question was the Project\u2019s resident bike guru: George \u201cThe Cogfather\u201d Babiak. You see, George has been biking pretty much his whole life, spent twenty years working at a bike shop, and tries to convince everyone he can that bicycles are, and always will be, the perfect mode of transportation. And after so many years of blindly hating those two wheeled menaces, for whatever reason (Age? Maturity? Weakness? Subway rage?) I was finally ready to hear him out and see what this biking thing was all about. But rather than just explaining it to me, George did one better. One day, out of nowhere, George brought in an old bike, fixed it up, tied a bow around it, and handed me the keys (minus the keys\u2026 and the bow, sadly). And while I still resented the bike for, you know, being a bike, I was so touched by the gesture that I had to humor George and give the old half-car a spin. So I did.<\/p>\n
And I\u2019m sure you could see this coming\u2026 I fell in love with that bike! Madly, deeply, passionately in love! I named it Street Stomper and I asked it to marry me! And we\u2019re still married to this day! Okay that last part is a SLIGHT exaggeration, but you get the point! After years of unabated bike bashing, I have now become an avid biker. And I\u2019m talking WICKED avid (I am from Rhode Island, after all). I bike to and from work, and everywhere else I go, all year round, rain or shine, freezing cold or stupid hot (safely of course, wear your helmets please).<\/p>\n
I never shut up about the things. I pedal in my sleep. Heck, when asked to write a blog entry on the new Project site about ANYTHING, guess what I chose? I\u2019ll give you one guess. (Oh come on, you don\u2019t need to guess. Stop being silly.) And I\u2019m not alone. You might be surprised just how many of us roll our way around this city. Aside from George and I there\u2019s Carol and her shiny, new, bright yellow bike: the Yellow Fever (just now named IN THIS BLOG ENTRY); John and his bike, Admiral Hopkinton Weatherbury; and the newest member of our clan, Liz \u201cBell Bike Helmets\u201d Bell and her lovely pink ride: Wendy. Heck, even our founder, Willie Reale, rolls in from time to time to visit us on his sweet new set of wheels. And it\u2019s not just about going to and from work for the Project Staff (though seriously, try it. You\u2019ll save $1,000 a year in subway fare, get free and awesome exercise, no longer need coffee in the morning, and see the city from a whole different perspective), we even take our bikes on the One-on-Ones and instantly become our traveling bike crew: The Road Tamers. Can you guess what we do to the road? I\u2019ll give you one guess. Tame it you say? Wrong, we ride on it. No one can tame the road. It\u2019s made of concrete. You were led astray by our hyperbolic name. Shame on you.<\/p>\n
The point is, we love bikes here at the Project, and hey, maybe you should too. Ride your bike over to the next show, park it on the wall near the entryway in our little bicycle parking lot, take it up stairs and have George tell you what\u2019s wrong with it, or show it to me, and even after years and years of knee jerk mocking, I promise, I won\u2019t hiss at it. I\u2019ll probably say, \u201cSweet wheels,\u201d and then challenge you to a race. And I\u2019ll probably win.<\/p>\n
You heard me.<\/p>\n
Love!<\/p>\n
Josh Moody & Street Stomper<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Josh Moody Have you ever noticed how many bikes there are at the Project? Ever been to a Smart Partner Picnic and rode down to the piers with the whole group, looking like a weird, kid invasion stage of the Tour de France? Have you ever gone into George\u2019s shop in the back, lookedContinue reading “A Bicycle Built for Two…ey”<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[19,25,33,34,35,36,37,38],"class_list":["post-1585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-news-flash","tag-52nd-street-project","tag-babiak","tag-bikes","tag-carol","tag-george","tag-john","tag-josh","tag-liz"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/52project.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/52project.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/52project.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/52project.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/52project.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/52project.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/52project.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/52project.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/52project.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}