Chicks, Bikes and Brooklyn: A Woman-Owned Bike Shop in a Changing Neighborhood

As I pet two curled-up, matching black cats, KT Higgins gets up to grab the ringing phone that sits in a pile of bike tools and unopened gear. “Bike Shop,” she says, and answers a few questions before sitting down with the cats and me.

In its six months of existence, this unassuming building on DeKalb Avenue has been called “Brooklyn Bikes,” “Bike Shop” and, most recently, “Velo Bikes.” With nothing but a hanging canvas sign to mark its place, this one-room, woman-owned bike shop is evolving as rapidly as the neighborhood it occupies.

“I’m that person with the very ugly bike all the time,” KT tells me, as we chat about the aesthetics of our bikes (She doesn’t technically own one.) and of our gentrifying, formerly German, formerly Italian, soon-to-be-formerly Latino neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. She likes the neighborhood because “it’s great for cyclists” and, frankly, there aren’t too many affordable places left in New York.

Empty soy milk and beer bottles line the front counter as a pile of vintage, rehabbed and custom bikes dominate the room. Her shop is a part-time gallery space in the evening and the left wall is consistently lined with provocative, if not downright dark, artwork. With a stash of gear that any Bushwick hipster would drool over, fluorescent bar grips and pink road rims are on display, with colored chains, tires and every shape of handlebar your brain can muster.

With the bike culture of New York steadily moving Eastbound, it’s no wonder that the neighborhood once known for blackouts, riots and crackheads is slowly becoming the new haven for 20-somethings and their fixed-gear Bianchis. Guilt of gentrification aside, it is rare in cycling cities to find more than one woman working at a bike shop. It is even rarer to find a shop that is woman-owned. “At my first job at a bike shop 10 years ago, I was the ‘sales chick.' There were no other girls working there,” KT laughs. “I was a bike messenger, so I got a job as the sales chick to get free tires.”

Since then, KT worked her way from “sales chick” to bike mechanic at a slew of Manhattan shops before heading to Brooklyn, where she now lives in the garden apartment below her shop. While she loves her space in Bushwick, she hopes that “we’re not bought out of this neighborhood either.”

The tough part of owning your own business, after all, is forking over the rent that’s due when the trendy kids move in. That gentrification thing: it’s bittersweet.

Saving the pretentious bike-repair attitude for Manhattan, KT has a knack for getting to know her customers. Unlike a typical bike shop with staff that waits for you to come to them, KT is always talking to a customer. “Our shop is all about service, and we teach as we work. We’re not gonna judge you when you come in, and we avoid those strict bike shop rules that alienate people from the cycling community.”

The shop will take your used parts donations to keep beater bikes on the road, and she’s not afraid to give a freebie every once in awhile. It’s the “not charging you for every little thing” that makes her shop unlike any other shop in the city. But she’s a pretty good sales chick, too.

Velo Bikes is located @ 1342 DeKalb Ave, between Myrtle and Wilson in Bushwick, NYC.