Left: Sid’s Bikes owner Allen Schulman stands outside his store at 151 W. 19th St. in Chelsea, which opened last May to specifically cater to the West Side. His business is up for a $100,000 grant being offered by Microsoft for small businesses to advance their tech operations. Right: The store, near Seventh Ave., is the largest bike shop in the city in terms of space, offering some of the highest-quality products on the market.
Chelsea bike shop pedaling wares to West Side riders
By Charlotte Cowles
Sid’s Bikes on W. 19th St. in Chelsea is an airy, well-lit space with gleaming storefront windows and countertops so clean you could eat Powerbars off of them. “It’s the prettiest bike store in New York City, not just the largest,” said Allen Schulman, the store’s owner, gesturing towards the carefully racked bicycles and polished glass cases filled with sunglasses, tools and other cycling equipment.
“I always knew that Chelsea was underserved in terms of high-caliber bike shops,” said Schulman, who opened his store near Seventh Ave. last May. “The bike shops here were grimy, dark, and cluttered. For people who are enthusiastic and passionate about the sport, I feel like I owe it to them to give them a good experience shopping for their stuff.”
With the new bike lane on Ninth Ave. and the ever-expanding park along the West Side Highway, Chelsea has become one of the most bike-friendly neighborhoods in Manhattan, Schulman noted. He opened up shop in Chelsea last May, adding the larger sister store to complement his 15-year-old Kips Bay location. In comparison to his East Side store, the West Side location “has got to be bigger and better,” Schulman said, because of its proximity to an influx of bike-friendly development in the neighborhood.
“It’s become so fashionable to be environmentally conscious,” he added. “It’s not weird anymore to be that guy who rides to work and changes when he gets there.” He said that his staff all rides to work. “They’re all really into it. It’s one of our criteria for hiring.”
But even with Sid’s newfound growth in Chelsea, Schulman wants to expand further and is currently vying for a grant to peddle his wares on a worldwide platform.
Sid’s is currently a top three finalist in a contest held by the Microsoft-sponsored Small Business Summit, with the winner receiving $100,000 for a “tech makeover.” Schulman wrote a 3,000-word essay and made a short video to enter, and plans to expand his business’s Web presence with the funds. He has the product, but currently lacks the resources to successfully sell in the online market.
“I’d rather not do an e-commerce site unless I could do it right,” he said. Microsoft will announce the winner on March 24, and if Schulman wins, the pristine products on display in his Chelsea store could be available to bikers the world over.
The current Chelsea location already caters to all kinds of cyclists, and the sales floor has the selection to show for it. Shiny rows of snappy neon racing bicycles stand next to candy-colored kids’ bikes with tassels on the handlebars and training wheels fixed to the sides. The apparel choices fit those who are comfortable in full-body spandex—as well as those who aren’t.
Schulman said he has noticed a difference in Chelsea from his East Side clientele. “Over here it’s more people in their 30s and 40s, as well as families,” he said. “It’s a higher-income demographic than in Kips Bay. People coming to this neighborhood have expendable capital.”
Sid’s Bikes began as an auto shop in upper Manhattan, owned by Schulman’s father and the store’s namesake, Sid. The shop was then called Chain Auto and sold a few bikes as well as auto parts and locksmithing services in 1969. During the 1973 oil embargo, bikes became a bigger part of the store’s sales, and in 1979, the store officially changed its name to Sid’s Bike Corp. and moved to Riverdale in the Bronx, where they sold bikes exclusively.
Schulman worked at his father’s shop throughout his childhood. “I remember, as a kid, helping my dad work on bikes, learning about it, literally selling bikes,” he said. In 1993 Schulman opened Sid’s Bikes in Kips Bay, and in 2005, Sid retired, closing the original Bronx location.
“It’s been great to take on that legacy,” he said. Sid, who is 79 now, recently saw the video for the Small Business Summit contest. “He liked it,” Schulman added.
While Schulman is above all a businessman, he choose this moment to expand his realm in the Manhattan bike business as cycling presents a fun and healthy solution for trendy environmental living. He is an avid cyclist himself and earnestly rattles off the benefits of bike-friendly city living.
When it comes to the bikes versus cars, Schulman takes a modest stance, applauding the city’s efforts to become more bike-friendly instead of ranting against congestion. “I give a lot of credit to this administration,” he said, citing city officials’ recent trip to Copenhagen to study urban planning tactics in a city where cycling commuters outnumber drivers.
“Amanda Burden [chairperson of the City Planning Commission] flew to Copenhagen to find out, ‘Why do more people bike to work here than anywhere else in the world?’” recounts Schulman, who extols the virtues of pro-bike urban planning, including bike racks on city buses and trains. “A week or two after she came back, they put up the Ninth Ave. bike lane.” The lane, which was planned in September and constructed in October as the city’s first-ever “physically separated” bike lane, runs from 14th St. to W. 23rd St.
While Schulman is the first to believe that this administration is “doing a good job” to encourage more cycling and less car travel, he does have one criticism of the lane: There needs to be more of it. “I understand that it’s an experiment,” he said. “But in order for bike lanes to be effective, there needs to be a network of them around the city. This one is really only useful for people going between 23rd Street and 14th Street”
Schulman believes, simply, that cars are “unfriendly.” When people are on bikes, he said, they interact with passersby. “You can ring your bell at a neighbor or a friend, or talk to someone. People in cars—they don’t interact with each other,” he said. “Putting more cars into a city makes for a less-friendly city.”
As for more radical actions against cars, Schulman was cautious. He believes in working with the city to reduce traffic rather than rebelling against it. “Congestion pricing—we support that,” he said. As for Critical Mass, an organized event where bikers take to city streets en masse and block cars as a pro-cycling, anti-driving statement, Shulman was less enthusiastic. “They raise a good point—take the streets away from cars—but they need to bring up the point in a less controversial way, so the city can hear their message.”
He was also full of ideas when it came to structured ways to improve the city streets for bicycles. “In Portland, there are bike racks on buses so that you can easily just lock your bike onto the outside of bus when you get on—you don’t have to worry about carrying it on,” he said. “There are lots of things that a city can do, to be more bike-friendly. They’re working on it.”
Schulman hopes to expand into two more stores down the road, with another possibly planned for the West Side if all goes as planned. Securing a $100,000 grant would certainly help his cause.
“Normally I don’t fill out these contests,” Schulman acknowledged, “but I feel like we deserve to win.”
