No matter where you are in the Midwest, it feels like The Heart of the Midwest. No town proclaims itself the “Fist of the Midwest,” “The Brains” or “The Pancreas.” In contrast to the Northwest, where people want to “Keep Portland Weird,” in this part of the country folk yearn for consistency, common sense, a purity of plainness. And so, we are all “The Heart.”
This truth says a lot about who we are as a place, and it helps explain how difficult it can be, when traveling within the Midwest, to experience difference. Apart from struggling independent bookstores and curry shops, I usually seek difference and weirdness in bike shops, and thank goodness for them.
Recent excursions have introduced me to two shops in particular that seem to represent extremes in the genre: from glossy and ethereal on the one hand, to an earthy sincerity on the other.
The first of these recent visits was to the flagship Shinola store in downtown Detroit (above). And boy is it something. The place is so immaculate and refined and atmospheric that it feels like something projected into your mind rather than something you walk into with your feet. The retail staff each sports a persona that ranges all the way from well-coiffed lumberjack to well-coiffed thoughtful-outdoorsy-type to someone who might date either of those two.
And they’re nice. One taught me what I do wrong when I tamp my espresso shots. The rest at least looked friendly. Absent was any sense that customers were valued according to the profile of their calf muscles. Indeed, at no time was I even given the impression that any of these employees had ever actually ridden a bike.
The customers milled about more than they shopped, like at a gallery opening. Shinola seems to be using the idea of bicycles in order to sell the idea of Detroit. But it could be the other way around. Or maybe those two ideas combine to help sell the idea of watches and leather-goods. It is all very confusing and beautiful and I want everything I saw there.
And then, far away on the other side of the bike shop universe, is Bike Courier Bike Shop in Louisville, Kentucky. Where the Shinola visit was itself a destination, planned for weeks, this one was a surprise hidden among a stretch of workmanlike 19th century storefronts, preceded by a rushed parallel-parking job rather than a Siri-guided tour.
And you can probably imagine the place. This is the shop with all of the bikes. But it’s even better than that one because this is also the shop with more bikes crammed in its underlit crumbling-brick-floor basement full of spiders. It’s the one with the workbench built with 2×4 lumber, where you have to walk around the repair stand to get to the counter, where the owner, the only one there, streams the local soccer club’s first game of the season while relating to you the store’s curious backstory. You forget the details but remember that it was a good story, or at least kind of interesting, or at least definitely not a finely-honed marketing strategy.
These two spots feel like extremes, the bike shop version of Apollo and Dionysus: one a controlled pursuit of selling the “bicycle” as an abstract, high-value idea, the other a jumble of actual bikes, parts and people that has grown organically from the ground up, originating in a desire to ride. And the beautiful thing is that both of these stores invest their little corners of the Midwest with a sense of local identity and strangeness that is increasingly hard to find these days.
