After a few calls to bike shops, it became clear: No one wanted to put the Flying Pigeon together.
I bought the big black city bicycle, a classic from China imported via a shop in Los Angeles, as a gift for my wife’s 30th birthday in early May. Yet as June loomed, it still sat unassembled in its rectangular box in my living room.
Josef Bray-Ali, the West Coast shop owner who sold me the bike for $599 (the special saddle was an extra $70, and the shipping was $80), had warned that it would be hard to put together — “You need someone good” — but I figured finding a skilled mechanic in New York City would be no problem. In this bike-friendly city, how hard could it be to find someone who could build a simple machine that hundreds of millions of Chinese have been riding since Mao’s day?
“No, oh no, no,” said a mechanic at one downtown shop that Mr. Bray-Ali had recommended. It was the spring rush, the mechanic told me, and he was too busy. He recommended finding a shop in Chinatown on the notion that someone Chinese might be better equipped and knowledgeable.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Chung Pai, the Chinese-American owner of Landmark Vintage Bicycles on the Lower East Side. The bike is notorious, he said, because the nonstandard parts are hard to come by. That might have explained the reaction I got from shops: some said they would do it, only to turn it down later when I called back to confirm.
I had thought the gift would be both romantic (we had recently spent time in China) and practical (she could more comfortably bike in her work clothes), but the big brown box was neither.
I began to worry that the bike’s charm — its easygoing ride and springy seat, like a Barcalounger on two wheels, and that moniker — had overwhelmed my street sense. Had I fallen into the increasingly familiar trap of putting bicycling form ahead of bicycling function?
The classic look of the Flying Pigeon, whose design emulates midcentury British bicycles, is certainly part of its appeal.
“It’s the style that attracts people,” said Ian Cunningham, a former art director for Brooks Brothers who has been importing Flying Pigeons from Tianjin, China, for three years. “They’re the iconic bike.” He said the bikes sold far better in Manhattan (form) than in Brooklyn (function; or, perhaps, form of a pared-down variety).
Mr. Cunningham said he currently had a waiting list of 40 people — that’s why I went to Los Angeles in the first place — and was expecting two shipping containers packed with 500 bicycles to arrive by early July. He said that he and his fiancée, Victoria, planned to open the city’s first dedicated Flying Pigeon shop on Canal Street in the fall.
So where are all those people getting their Pigeons put together? Mr. Cunningham recommended Toga in Chelsea, Bike Works on the Lower East Side, or a “master mechanic” named Dennis Healy at 504 Canal Street.
But before I had the chance to call them, my partner in the Spokes column, Sean Patrick Farrell, who had worked as a bicycle mechanic for 10 years, said he would give it a try.
Read more and view photos at The New York Times
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