It was a bright summer morning in the Village when I stepped out of my house on 11th Street to find a flyer on my bike, tied to the handlebar with an old fashioned rubber band. I recognized the vintage design with the image of a distinguished gentleman pushing his European-style bike right away and my morning got even brighter: It was from the local bike shop, Hudson Urban Bicycles that closed 20 months ago, announcing: “The HUB is back!”
I immediately rode my bike—which I bought years ago from the HUB—to the corner of Charles and Washington to find shop owner George Bliss selling and renting his (significantly decreased) bikes now from a container in the outdoor space. The giant garage next to it, which used to house the biggest part of the HUB, is closed. “Citi Bike put me out of business. They put five stations around me, five!”
When Citi Bike launched in 2013, they cut his rentals in half in a year and another half the next year. His total revenues dropped by 50 percent. Still, George Bliss is not against a bike sharing system in general. “It is supposed to be a link to mass transit so I think the one on Christopher Street, by the Path…station, is justified. But two stations alone on Bank Street?! They don’t care about bike ownership. They don’t care about the local bike economy.”
It is also the bike culture in New York that he is concerned about. “It must become an adult and not a juvenile culture. [T]hat’s why I and three other bike shops in the city are all closed, [because] we’re building a ‘sophisticated urban bike culture,’ just like in Amsterdam or Copenhagen. [But] Citi Bike is no culture. One bike for all the people with an ad on it, a corporate brand, is NOT a culture!”
Lots of locals love and miss the culture that George Bliss brought to the West Village with his variety of mostly European bikes. I talked to Angela Louison, a longtime customer: “I discovered the HUB after inheriting a bike frame that was valuable but not even close to being road ready. George and his mechanic spent days figuring out solutions to the issues that…fit my tiny budget…after two other bike shops in the area couldn’t help me.”
“We were devastated when they had to close,” recalls Angela.
When that happened in December of 2014, George Bliss sold all of his rental bikes to Community Access in the Bronx, an assisted housing facility for people with psychiatric disabilities: “They wanted them to get out of the TV room and ride bikes instead.” Dozens of brand new bikes went on Craigslist for half price. He put the rest into storage in Brooklyn. “I was barely surviving,” says Bliss who opened his first bike shop in the West Village on Morton Street ten years ago. “But now I’m back, at least for the next three months, until it gets too cold.”
In the spring of 2017, an outdoor/indoor market will open at that location for three years. Bliss could be part of the concept but only on a 20ft. x 20 ft. section in the corner. He calls his new business model—an outdoor bike shop—an experiment: Two containers lease for $4 per day and store the 50 bikes he still owns. “I’m willing to do this experiment even if I don’t succeed financially here because I want to learn how to use these containers, how to be more efficient with space, how to create shade, how to protect myself from rain, wind, heat. How to create a store in a box. How to be nomadic. I’m sure it will work somewhere, whether it’s in Flatbush, Savannah, New Orleans or Portland.”
Let’s hope he won’t become a nomad. Let’s hope he won’t disappear for good.
