Saturday brought my favorite thing about Halloween, and one of my favorite things about living in New York City: Bike Kill, a combination block party, freak show, and mutant bike festival held each year on a dead-end street in Brooklyn on the Saturday before Oct. 31.
The premise is simple: The organizers provide dozens of bizarre bicycles (tall, tiny, long, short, etc.), which anyone can ride back and forth — preferably in costume. It tends to attract lots of art-punks, anarchists, and freaks, but you’ll also see relatively “normal” people, sometimes with their kids.
You can get a sense of the mood in the video I shot (see above), and these pics provide a closer look at some of the bikes:
Bike Kill is presented each year by the New York chapter of the Black Label Bike Club, an arts/cycling collective that builds all the crazy bikes and allows the public to ride them. The members are easy to spot, because they have a uniform of sorts:
A great time, as always. I love Bike Kill!
What a great event! I need to watch the video several more times to catch everything.
Slap a noisy two-stroke motor on some of those, and they’d look at home in a Mad Max film!
nice pictures! bike kill is always a hoot. I spotted you, but didn’t get a chance to say hello.
Good to know at least one Uni Watch reader was there!
Maybe I’m just not hip enough, but there’s no chance I’m hopping on some of those without a helmet. Some awesome designs though – that triple-stack where the rubber from the top wheel turns the middle wheel, which turns the bottom is a work of engineering mayhem.
What’s the story with the plastic barrels?
Cheers
Rand
Obstacles.
What’s the story with the plastic barrels?
Cheers
Rand
Very nice indeed. I come from a real bicycle country but we don’t have cool bike gatherings like this one!
Hey Paul, my partner and I went this year based on your report from last year. What a blast! We got there around 5:00. The crowd was much larger by then, so I didn’t get a lot of great photos of the bikes. Also, the % of “normal” people among the riders was much lower. The joust was a trip. I really appreciate that you share slices of life like this on the blog.
Envious that you got to see the joust! I had to leave by then. Glad you enjoyed!