 The day the lady with the behemoth but
ailing Schwinn Klunker 5 came to Dave Perry's Greenwich bike shop, she had already been told by New
York's finest wrenchers that her 1978 vintage ride was history.
But Taliah Lempert, a fine artist eking out a living painting bicycles, loved that five-speed cruiser
with its working siren and she had heard about a funky shop at this alternative transportation haven
called the Hub. So she tried her luck.
"It's a crazy bike with things they don't make any more," Lempert recalled recently. "I wandered into Dave's store
looking for parts and ,wow, there were all these crazy bikes. He said, "what is that you're riding?' He
saved the day with that bike."
Little did Perry know a few years ago when he was hunting for an axle long enough to fix the Klunker's huge
hub with a drum brake but the longtime racer, wrench and bike advocate had just met his soul mate. Soon they
were hanging Lempert's paintings around The Hub and talking nonstop. They were hooked.
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"We've been partnered up pretty much since then," said Perry, a soft-spoken 46-year-old with quite a history in the American
bike scene. "We can talk about bikes endlessly - and art. She has a lot of bikes. She also has stored over
at her place five or ten of mine."
Taliah
and Dave thrive on New York City bike culture. They hang out with folks from Transportation Alternatives.
They're regulars at Critical Mass rides. They commute by bike and race Alley cats with messengers.
And both were entrenched in the bike community before they met.
Perry is the Palo Alto, Calif.-born author of the seminal cycling encyclopedia, Bike Cult, and co-authored
1993's Bicycle Blueprint: A Plan to Bring Bicycling into the Mainstream in New York City. In the '70's,
Perry was among the top amateur racers in the United States. He moved on to race promotion under Michael
Aisner at the Red Zinger Classic and Dave Chauner at Trexlertown in the early '80's - the beginning if
the professionalization of domestic racing.
But it was Bike Cult, a 12-year project compiling every bicycling-related statistic and fact Perry could find into a single volume, that truly left Perry's mark on the world of two-wheels.
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