The Editor’s recent musings on Greg and the Bike Hut on San Francisco’s Embarcadero brought to mind my own bike experiences when I arrived in the City in 1995 – from Iowa – with a one-speed bicycle with balloon tires that had been manufactured in Chicago in the late 1940s by the Monark Silver King Company.
I acquired the bicycle during my days as a graduate student and teacher in Iowa City. Purchased for $5 from a tenant who was moving out of one of the other apartments in the building where I first resided, the bicycle was a two-tone light blue and white. The logo in front beneath the handlebars bore the image of crown and the words “Monark” and “Chicago, U.S.A..”
During my last year in Iowa, it provided my daily transportation to and from the family-owned organic vegetable farm on the city’s southern perimeter where I worked throughout the summer and fall of 1994 in exchange for free access to the vegetables the farm’s owner, a few farmworker tenants, local residents and I planted, tended and harvested as part of a Community Supported Agriculture project.
When I was preparing my move from Iowa City to San Francisco, I began to disencumber as many of my possessions as possible, as there was a limited amount of storage space in my 1974 Dodge Dart. My Fender Stratocaster went to my friend Ottilie. My Peavey amplifier went to Greg Brown sideman Bo Ramsey. My book collection was boxed and shipped to Oakland via Amtrak. And I pedaled off on the Monark to Greg the Bike Hut’s spiritual confrere in Iowa City, Ed the Hippy Bike Guy, with plans to sell it.
When I arrived at Ed’s, I was barely off the bike before he started to tinker with it using a wrench. I told him I was leaving town for good and would let him have the Monark for whatever he thought it was worth. Ed said, “I could give you $20 for it, or I could give you this bike rack” – he pointed to a somewhat decrepit metal frame lying nearby on the grass – “and you’d be riding in style in San Fran’.” The only thing missing from the rack was a protective rubber stopper that would prevent the rack from scratching the trunk of my car when strapped in place. Ed said I could probably find one at the Salvation Army store on the outskirts of town.
Armed with the bike rack and my new-found plan to take the Monark with me across the plains to California, I arrived at the Salvation Army emporium. Behind the counter sat a bearded man with one leg in a cast and a pair of crutches propped up against the wall. I told him I was looking for a rubber stopper, something akin to the ones that were attached to the bottom of his prosthetic devices.
“I heard you was comin’ by,” he remarked in a Deliverance-inflected drawl. “They’re over on the shelf.”
After I found one that looked like it would work, I brought it to the counter and asked the price.
“What’s it worth to you?,” he asked.
“Whatever you think is fair,” I answered.
“How about twenty-five cents?”
From my top-floor flat in an 1889 Victorian in the Western Addition (the cost of a private room obtained via the then-still extant Haight Ashbury Roommate Referral Service with several roommates: $375 per month), I would descend the stairs and unlock the basement where the Monark resided when not in use. Over the course of several months, I made the counter-intuitive and somewhat astonishing discovery that despite San Francisco’s precipitously hilled topography, if you choose your route carefully, many if not most of the city’s neighborhoods were accessible with a one-speed bicycle. The Marina was a notable exception, but then the relatively affluent Marina in those days was not a destination high on my list of priorities. More amenable, and featuring a more interesting cross-section of humanity, was JFK Drive during the Sunday closures to traffic in Golden Gate Park.
Traveling through the City on the Monark on the cusp of the first dot.com upheaval, San Francisco residents were outspokenly vocal in their admiration for the bike. The Monark I rode was technically a women’s bike – i.e. it had an open or step-through frame – but the accolades it elicited were not limited to the City’s lesbian population.
“I like that shit you’re ridin’,” was one response from a black male pedestrian on the sidewalk as I pedaled one day south up Divisadero.
In 2007, I learned that the private prep school next door to the Victorian where I had resided since my arrival in the City had purchased the building from its oddball Italian owner in Vacaville and planned to demolish it to make way for an assembly wing. As I prepared to move out, the long-time tenant in the second-floor flat (“In the 1970s, I was accused of being responsible for bringing 70% of the marijuana into this country – they underestimated it”) asked me if there were any of my possessions stored in the basement that I wanted to keep, as he had agreed to oversee the process of clearing it out. If so, he would set them aside.
I said the only thing I wanted to save was the Monark and he replied that he would. I might have realized that when communicating with ex-drug kingpins you can’t always take them at their word.
In due course, the building was dutifully demolished and with it the Monark and my bicycling days in San Francisco.
Ride on!