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 name — 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 Metro 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. “I can’t imagine why somebody would refuse to put this together,” he said as he got down to it on his concrete patio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He attached the hand-painted fenders, adjusted the three-speed Sturmey Archer gearing, then set up the headlight, which attaches to the front fork and gathers its power from the movement of the wheel. “It’s got more doodads than your average bike,” he noted. Still, though some hardware apparently had been lost in transit and had to be supplemented with extra nuts and bolts from his stash, the bike was done in less than two hours. My wife and I had our first ride last Sunday, a short trip from Washington Heights around the Cloisters. On the way back, we stopped for coffee. I left her with the bikes on 181st Street, and when I returned with two cups, she was grinning. Not only did the Pigeon fly, she said, but someone had just stopped to say, “Nice bike.” Now we’re just hoping that nothing breaks. Correction: June 20, 2010 An earlier version of this blog post gave an incorrect name for a shop in Chelsea. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...ldnt-fly/?_r=0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AxkYH3uFnQ
The Flying Pigeon is the bike that has pushed forward not only billions of people, but also history itself. It is at the forefront of the whole bicycle phenomenon in the People's Republic of China. In 1950 revolutionary China was a tightly controlled and regimented society. Political beliefs, education, where people lived, what jobs they held and the amounts of goods produced by factories and farms were all centrally planned. The two-wheeled vehicle was the approved form of transport, and the nation became zixingche da guo, the Kingdom of Bicycles. A bicycle was one of the three "must-haves“ of every citizen, alongside a sewing machine and watch - essential items in life that also offered a hint of wealth in those dour times. In Maoist China, the famed Flying Pigeon bicycle was a symbol of an egalitarian social system that promised little comfort but a reliable ride through life. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the logo became synonymous with almost all bicycles in the country. The Flying Pigeon was the single most popular mechanized vehicle on the planet, becoming so ubiquitous that Deng Xiaoping - the post-Mao leader who launched China's economic reforms in the 1970s - defined prosperity as "a Flying Pigeon in every household". In the early 1980s, Flying Pigeon was the country's biggest bike builder, and its 20-kilo black one-speed models were the pride of hero workers nationwide. There was a multiyear waiting list to get one, and even then you needed good guanxi, or connections - not to mention about four months' wages for most workers. Nowadays, of all the bicycle logos in China today, the silhouette of a pigeon resting on the two letters FP is probably the best-known. Despite declining domestic sales, the Flying Pigeon remains China's bike, if only because much of the brand's existing rolling stock is still in service, many handed down through generations. Flying Pigeon has become one of China's most storied brands and the most popular and influential bicycle in the world.
