Now Perry runs Bike Works (106 Ridge Street), a specialty shop aimed at
recycling bikes for transportation in a city overwhelmed with cars. It's Perry's second location, since the demise of The Hub -
the owner sold the building - forced him to relocate along with the skate shop, used bookstore, pedicab service and others.
Now on the Lower East Side, Bike Works is the sort of intimate
bike shop where "friends" can still drop of repairs or pick up bikes
well after closing, as long as Perry is in the house. And he usually is. In the midst of a late-night interview with The Ride,
someone dropped by with a set of wooden rims to add to the shop's eclectic mix of two-wheeled paraphernalia.Lempert, 32, originally
from Ithaca, NY, is a nationally recognized artist whose two-wheeled paintings have been featured not only in New York galleries
but on CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood. She Is a graduate of Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the New York
Academy of Art. She has designed posters for New York's Bike Month in '99 and Bike Week this year and last.
And she goes everywhere in New York on one of her 10 bikes, usually beginning with a grunt across the bridge from her Brooklyn loft.
"I think New York is a great cycling city and I wish the city would promote it more. It's beautiful to see all the different
neighborhoods and there aren't many hills," Lempert said. "Well, the Williamsburg Bridge is a hill but it's good for you."
Together, Lempert and Perry also form the core of a group of racers who compete regularly at the quirky concrete Kissena Velodrome
in Flushing and the many Alley Cats put on by the city's active bike messenger community. They also race on the road.
"He's a pretty amazing rider. He gets all happy riding. After races he's all smiles," Lempert said of Perry, the former Cat.
1 now racing under a Cat. 5 license.This spring, the couple is lending their Barelli Quadruplet Competition Roller Set to the
New York City Bike Show at the World Trade Center. The device lets four riders compete over 500 meters, with their progress
shown on the eight-foot dial face with four colored hands.
Foremost in their thoughts , however, is Lempert's upcoming show at the Sweatshop Studio (456 Broadway, 4th floor), where bike
valet service will be available for the May 11th opening. Her paintings - of her bikes, friends' bikes, bikes Dave loaned her from
the shop - sell for upward of $3,000. Etchings can be had for less.
The more used and personalized the subject, the better, Taliah says. Showroom bikes just don't have the same character as, say, the
black and white Rollfast tandem she and a friend just had to have - after spying it for rent at Dave's shop.
"She's fulfilling her dream," Perry gushed. "In some ways, I look at it and she's got it made. She paints and she can look at neat
bikes all day. I know I can look at my neat bikes all day. You think about all the great rides on it. How it was made. All that. To
do that and paint it? That's great." Lempert is also a founding
member of a group called Bicycle Cherry, a self - described "posse of princesses on pistes." The group of female fixed-gear riders
grew out of a disparaging comment hollered out to Taliah and friends once by a little boy as they rode by. "Bicycle cherries!" He
yelled. The name stuck.One of the Cherry outings involved a citywide
Alley Cat race last year that just happened to coincide with a protest march over the slaying of Amadou Diallo, the Bronx man who
was shot to death NY police who mistook his wallet for a gun.
"That was a nightmare. One friend got a flat, we fixed it and said, 'Oh, hell with it.' We knew we were out of it, so we decided to
stay downtown, wait for the party and go over and check in on the protest," she said.
When the friends pedaled over to 5th Avenue, they found no traffic and fewer people, so they decided to venture further up the street to meet the marchers.
First they encountered police, though, and Taliah's two friends both wound up getting arrested for no other reason than being in the
wrong place at the wrong time.
"It was the weirdest thing. We weren't there two minutes and my friends were arrested. I was like, give me their bikes! I was standing
there with three track bikes in the middle of the protest," Lempert said. "We were just crossing the street. We weren't even protesting.
I still can't get my head around it."The moral is if you are in a race, keep racing."
Check out Taliah Lempert's paintings online at
www.bicyclepaintings.com or head to the Sweatshop Studio at 456 Broadway between May 11th and 20th to see
the paintings in person. The gallery is open noon to 7 p.m. Thursday through Sunday and by appointment.BACK
