This year’s Bike Kill was really fun! While it lasted.
We showed up to this years location around noon. A giant industrial parking lot with a massive truck overhang. A fence hop away from the Evergreens Cemetery, and in the deepest pocket of Bushwick, technically on the border of Brownsville and Ridgewood, Queens. It was the perfect location and the perfect space. My friends and I were there to babysit some of the ramps courtesy of Meseroll Bike Shop and my friends who showed up the day before to assemble them in the dark.
As soon as a small handful of people showed up, the weird bikes came out. It was magical. It was everything the inner child in you loves about Bike Kill.
Before you knew it, a police car showed up. Then a handful of police cars. Then it got weird. It turned into a negotiation of sorts. It was hard to watch friends and organizers banter back and forth with police and on their phone stressed, during one of the funnest and most iconic New York Halloween traditions there is.
Eventually we ended up getting barricaded into the parking lot. Then we’re told we could leave, but couldn’t come back. Then we’re told that the owner of the property has to physically show up in person to ok the event. Then we’re told that the permit we had to have the event only covered up to 200 participants, and that the police estimated that the massive crowd of people waiting outside to get in, numbered around a thousand.
Over the next few hours, it was a real emotional rollercoaster, as we tried to figure out what to do. Eventually, we shut it down and sent spectators and friends out on a couple of group rides, just to keep the spirit going and moving.
Once everyone else was gone, my friends and I waited in the empty parking lot past dark for our transportation to show up, as we disassembled the ramps we brought and built, to transport them back to Meseroll Shop. Finally got some food, and tried to head over towards the reincarnated Bike Kill at the old Home Depot location to find it was shut down by the time we got there.
Well. I had fun. Blasting the ramps we built, taking photos, and hanging out with my friends riding bikes is literally all I want in life, so despite the bust. I can’t complain.
Hope you enjoy my day in a series of photos…
