From Bags to Bikes

She was a blue Raleigh 10-speed. I spotted and fell in love with her the day I moved to New York. I could watch her from outside my dorm window, where she was locked on the street and never moved. I dreamed of liberating her, replacing her tires and tubes, and riding her around the neighborhood.

Like bags stuck in trees, bicycles abandoned to street furniture are ubiquitous in New York City. Though they don’t flutter or shred, the bicycles shed parts as crackheads, looking to make enough for their next fix, strip anything not permanently secured. Wheels are usually the first to go; saddles and seatposts are removed next. Finally, handlebars and stems, brakes and derailleurs, pedals and cranks, bottom brackets and headsets disappear, until the frame slumps onto the sidewalk. Bags twist in the wind—-bicycle frames twist under the weight of drivers who accidentally jump the curb.

Like plastic shopping bags, they come in all sorts of colors and brands: Huffy mountain bikes, Raleigh road bikes, Schwinn cruisers, Swobo track bikes. Original paint jobs fade with the weather and steel parts sprout parasitic brown spots until the rust patches eat clear through the tubing.

Cyclists lock their bicycles to other abandoned bicycles, and then abandon those bikes. Whole piles of abandoned bicycle ooze out onto sidewalks from parking signs. Litter gravitates to abandoned bicycles, hiding underneath spokes and rims, and a trash heap of tangled tubes, McDonalds cups and Vitamin Water bottles emerges.

Along park fences, they form bicycle graveyards. The bicycle skeletons rest against the fencing like lines of Sicilian mummies. One can determine how long ago they deceased by their physical conditions. The older they are, the more distorted and unrecognizable their features.

Abandoned bicycles and stray shopping bags are both ignored by City departments. Frazier’s battle against shopping bags led him to invent the Bag Snagger, while my own crusade against abandoned bicycles led me to pilot an abandoned bicycle-recycling program, a partnership between NYU and the local environmental non-profit Time’s Up!’s Bicycle Co-op.

During the summer of 2007, armed with a small amount of funding through NYU's Green Grants, the Co-op’s head mechanic and I reclaimed, refurbished, and redistributed all the abandoned bicycles on NYU property. We tagged the bicycles with fliers, alerting owners that if the papers were not removed in two weeks, their bicycle would be considered abandoned. Using angle grinders, bolt cutters and a pretty memo from the Sustainability Coordinator, we sawed through locks and brought the bicycles back to our space. We scrubbed off rust and dirt, and replaced missing and worn parts in the evenings after our 9-5 grind. In September, we gave the bicycles a new lease on life, returning them to a group of NYU freshmen.

Photos from http://jschumacher.typepad.com/photos/abandoned_bikes/index.html

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