Across the board, beyond the limits of age and division of gender, the hierarchy of income or preference in style, people ride motorcycles for three reasons: to find a sense of freedom, to speed through the great outdoors, and to relieve the stress of daily monotony.
Motorcycle culture now thrives in cities such as New York, where the subway still rules as the mode of transportation that can ferry people under and away from traffic. The bikes offer a sleek alternative to the easy movement and convenient size of their pedal-powered counterparts.
Motorcycles have captivated the nation’s imagination since the first yawn of the 20th century, when cars afforded affluent families, and later restless postwar youth, the liberty of mobility. The motorcycle chassis, however, stripped the American dream to its sexiest parts: two wheels and roaring engine between the thighs- and a sense of control over how much the rider wants to risk.
The reasons for riding remain the same, but what they are riding has changed. Despite this decade’s persistently flagging economy, or perhaps because people feel the need to escape from their pockets, motorcycle ridership has been on an almost inverse incline. According to data from the motorcycle Industry Council, there are 9.6 million wannabe James Deans and Wild Ones on the road today, nearly twice as many who dreamt of the highway in the late 1990’s, and they’ve burned through more than 29 billion miles of pavement- a 40% increase since the economic bubble burst.
Not all brands have felt the distribution of this success. Surprisingly, shops servicing Harley-Davidsons, the original king of the steel beasts, seem to have slipped into outlying areas of the city. While sport bikes, off-highway models and cruisers have been dominating 78% of the motorcycle market, ownership of traditional and touring bikes, the kind that can weather a cross-country trip like Easy Rider’s famous “search for America”, have dwindled. At least one old-school dealership, 15-year-old Pote’s Bike Shop in East Williamsburg, is feeling the bleed.
Pote Reyes, 48, keeps a tough façade- enough to have made Ed, a local Harley mechanic, think twice before entering the doors. A black awning bares skull-and-crossbones to the outside world, and dismembered engine parts, such as a pair of handlebars adorning a shelf like gilded antlers, are camouflaged within the shop’s thicket of metal. A tall covered dog cage rattles and rasps near the checkout desk.
An award from Full Throttle Magazine for a Kraftec Softail named “Pote’s Creation” is framed at the shop entrance. A fat gold trophy hangs out in the hallway joining the storefront and the garage. This one’s for winning a drinking game. It doesn’t look like Reyes runs a stiff shop. Reyes, covered in graying tattoos, smiles and offers me his hand.
Puerto-Rican born Pote has lived in New York for most of his life and has been fixing motorcycles since he was 18 years old. Having received no formal training, he can put an entire motorcycle together under an exact 9 hours, a feat corroborated by his boys over after-hours whiskeys at the shop. His magic is the result of determination and intuition.
“The heart of the bike is the carburetor,” he says as he explains the working parts of an engine. Even though his technical knowledge comes from parts manuals, his bikes always run, even from the time he assembled his first machine, a Harley-Davidson One Piece. Felo, a lanky guy who sometimes helps around the shop, says that although he can put a bike together in working order himself, Pote seems to be able to pull missing screws out of his pocket like a magician.
The staff varies between five and twenty people, all considered family. These guys are of the old guard who love and live for the ride. As Cindy, a petite redhead who rides with John, a man with the cataract-blue eyes, points out, this bunch developed a bond with their Harleys. They built them by hand, drove cross-country on them and slept on them through many cold nights. “It takes a lot out of you, physically,” she says.
Pote maintains his business by selling miscellaneous parts and leather gear which he hand-tools. The winter is a better time for maintenance than traveling for sport. He sometimes sells custom bikes, although many of the ones in the shop are owned by members of his motorcycle club, a 50-person unit called “The Forbidden Ones”. He also houses other people’s bikes inside the shop, such as the small purple thing belonging to a woman who is suffering from terminal cancer. She’s become too ill to travel, but has been keeping her baby in the shop for the past three years.
This year the shop came dangerously close to closing, a result, according to Pote, of rent that has become too high and customers who are moving farther away with few new ones in the neighborhood to replace them. Still, he says he can’t do better than he is. “We treat the customers good and give them good service,” he shrugs. “If the customers don’t complain, then you’re doing well.” They also sell a great line of high-end Snap-On tools.
Pote is known locally as someone with a loyal group of regulars. The store is held together by a community that has been attending his part swaps and block parties for years. Sometimes so many riders show up from all over the city and upstate, he says, that the street lodging the shop has to be closed down. Pote also sponsors mass rides for Toys for Tots, fundraisers for the local Wyckoff hospital and Pampers diaper runs. The guys hanging out at the shop nod enthusiastically when their boss explains his charity work.
“We ride for the kids, man. Last Sunday, we had almost two thousand bikes riding up from Myrtle Avenue to Woodhaven,” Pote recounts, taking the blanket off the demon dog cage. Revealed inside are two tiny Yorkies, running around the corners of their box and irritating one another.
The rent this month nearly squashed Pote’s shop, but he paid it off by selling his beloved truck. He shakes it off with a such-is-life attitude. “I don’t want to close my shop, man. I’m 48 years old. What am I going to do, get a job? This is my life.”
Motorcycle business is still business, and the success of a brand or dealership depends on its ability to intuit customer’s changing desires. Riders are young once again, but they are more affluent now, yet thriftier, than their parents were when they bought their first bikes in the ‘60s or ‘70s. Gen X and Y is beginning to take its bikes to cramped city streets, having “discovered” them as an urban alternative to the heavy cost of keeping a car.
“There’s a generational shift going on,” says Tim Buche, President of the Motorcycle Industry Council, “And in many ways, New York is a key spot.”
Baby boomers on bikes outnumbered their grandkids 4:1 as recently as 2003. According to MIC research, that ratio was 2:1 by 2008. “In 2009, the median age of motorcyclists dropped for the first time in 19 years,” Buche continues. “In 2011, ridership was equal.”
Today, as before, people ride for style, but they need the bike to look good, be storable, and be able to weave in and out of traffic. Buche himself prefers to ride sport bikes. There are thriving motorcycle shops in the city, but what are they doing that Pote’s loyalty-driven, bare-bones approach lacks? Or is the Harley-Davidson- the original “bad to the bone” motorcycle, the original, iconic Captain America- and its fans simply aging?
Adam Barker, 30, has been living in Williamsburg for roughly two years. He has been riding for 5 years and loves it; he “would ride anything.” Barker’s own bike was a Triumph Speed Triple, a classic sports bike. He liked it for its character and streamlined appeal, giving it the appearance of an aerodynamic steampunk dragon. “It’s a stylish motorcycle,” he acknowledges proudly. “I like being seen on it, to be honest.”
He’s only ridden a Harley once. “Harleys are most popular with people who have been riding their entire lives,” observes Barker. “It’ often what their dads rode, and it’s what they get when they ride for the first time in their older years.”
All of Adam Barker’s five roommates ride or race, most of them professionally- a strong hub of dedicated young riders who keep at least 10 motorcycles in the building’s parking lot at all times. They look for shops where they can safely leave their vehicle and which can give them the tools and space to do most of their own repairs.
For this, they come to Motorgrrl, which according to many changed the local motorcycle business. It is also the first female-owned garage in the area.
Valerie Figarella has been spreading “good motorcycle juju” for 8 years. Located off the Bedford hub on the L train, Motorgrrl draws customers with budgets of various depths. Val, a petite firecracker in a newsboy hat, used to be a corporate computer programmer and runs a tight ship.
What Motorgrrl has done- and this has been echoed by nearly everyone interviewed for this article- has been to bring a “new” bike culture to Brooklyn. From the wrought-iron gate that gives passerby a peek at the menagerie of Japanese and Italian automobiles in the garage to the Technicolor pop-art display of beetle-like bucket helmets arranged on the inside wall, the shop looks as hip as its clientele.
It’s definitely a draw for the shop’s demographic, an age group ranging between college kids and the salt-and-peppers, although there are a few who have been riding since Death Race 2000 slammed into theaters. The business model is a community environment and a DIY repair spot, a place with style and lifts, compressors and parts washers- a new outlook for riders who, despite knowing how to fix their own technical issues, are often put off from owning their engines by the cost of parking and the danger of not having a reliable storage space.
Motorgrrl is digital, too, having embraced social networking as a way to connect with customers and reach out to moto-culture junkies: the shop’s linked up to Facebook, Twitter, and even a Tumblr page featuring vintage photographs of men and women behaving badly.
“Researching the competition is like a doctor researching other offices- some specialize in pediatrics, some do full checkups,” she explains. She personally sees a lot of Ducatis, Hondas, Suzukis and Kawasakis, two-stroke engines built for rapid acceleration.
“Harleys come with a stigma of being ‘badass’ and successful,” she says. But racing bikes, such as vintage Triumphs and Desmosedichis, are analogous to a Porsche or an Aston-Martin. “If you’re a classic cat, you’ll probably like old-school race bikes.” Used wheels are also cheaper and many owners are fascinated by the process of restoring their performance and aesthetics.
Figarella herself prefers racing bikes for their easy maintenance and lower price points. She purchased her first, a Yamaha 52 XT-250, when she was in college, having gotten it from someone who needed money to fuel a journey to Alaska. She now owns a Daytona and services BMW’s.
The garage now has 21 spaces, always mostly full. That Motorgrrl has done so well not just against the economy, but also physically close to local legends such as Indian Larry’s, is a testament to determination and a good sense of business and style.
At Pote’s, Cindy who rides with John tells me that Val is “one hell of a lady.”
“And it really means something that she is a woman,” Cindy explains. “As someone who has been in the biking world for decades, I know true bikers who would never give the time of day to a female mechanic. But many trust Val. And she’s had to work harder than anyone else to get there.”
Val’s toughness is earned, but the visual toughness of being on a motorcycle, of metal, leather and vibrating parts, is still a hot selling point. The wildly successful New York-based Deth Killers brand has been deliberately built on the legend of the actual DK motorcycle club, hot 20-something hooligans who post videos of themselves gunning through flames and abducting fashion models.
The Deth Killers sell their line of asphalt-resistant jeans in Soho, next to Saturday’s Surf Shop, a café that sells surfing gear to the hip and landlocked.
Pockets of people nostalgic for riding’s dirty days still congregate in order to keep vintage style alive. Corinna Mantlo holds a weekly screening of B-movie motorcycle flicks out of the back room at Otto’s Shrunken Head, a post-punk tiki bar in the East Village. The film buff says that now, as always, people love the rabble-rousing, rebel outlaw face of biking, and style is a way to manifest this image.
Mantlo, 31, grew up in Manhattan, raised on the stories her and her friend’s fathers told of their adventures in the 70s.
“We grew up with those stories,” she recalls. “It wasn’t just about riding and getting drunk. It was about art and trips and being broke and learning how to fix things yourself.” She said that as city kids, none of her friends owned cars, but as soon as they were able to pool together the several hundred bucks to go to motorcycle safety school, they jumped right on the seat.
The images of guys in the 1950’s and 60’s “smoking a cigarette and looking great next to a British bike” were real to these kids, but outside of the aesthetic allure, it was also an accessible hobby. They discovered a bike-centric Manhattan, a secret since noticed by many.
Mantlo, who keeps an eye on culture, views the popularity of Japanese and British racers more as a result of practicality than an abandonment of values. While she agrees that choppers are no longer the norm, she says it may be more about a price point that allows people, like the ones who are just beginning to grow their paychecks, to pick up a ride for about $1200 and feel the same rush afforded by any kind of status bike.
Her favorite move, The Wild Ones, is timeless because “speaks to our generation and city kids coming from broken homes.” For her, as it is for all riders, motorcycles are a means to escape the claustrophobia that inevitably settles into the soul from the city, a way “to just be able to split.”
In the world of 3-D action flicks, people ride expensive streamlined vehicles and look increasingly bionic, but we agree that “whether it was the Hell’s Angels in the 1960’s or today, it’s still about the same camaraderie.”
I’m not expecting to write tonight. It’s 10 pm on a Friday and I’m taking my bike out for a 50-mile spin despairingly early the next morning. Which is why I’m at my local watering hole, using free Wi-Fi and nursing a beer. I don’t pay attention at first to the young, blonde kid on the next bar stool, but he’s drawn to my monitor-illuminated face like a drunk moth and starts up a conversation. We banter for a few minutes; I ask where he’s from and what he does. I can tell he is not from New York. His name is Daniel, and he tells me that he and his buddy- the sullen one watching the TV- are professional ticket scalpers. Whether he’s weaving a very tall tale or bragging about his line of work, I need to hear his story:
As the marketing mix mantra of “Product, Price, Place, Promotion” emits is monotone sales pitch, guerilla marketing is the caffeinated antidote to our advertising doldrums. It is imaginative, experimental promotion; it’s the guy dressed in a gorilla suit handing out restaurant menus in front of a ramen restaurant. It’s also how Cunning, a London-based creative ad agency, won fame while working for FHM Magazine in 1999: it projected an image of centerfold Gale Porter, towering in her naked Amazonian glory, onto the Houses of Parliament in London. 
