Pump Up your Love Life at Date Day

Plus class schedules and new drop in hours

The shop invites you to Dating Day, on Saturday, September 20th. You can sign up using this link.

NB: you have EXCLUSIVE ACCESS to the sign up page because you subscribe! But don’t you hesitate to spread the word.

Skip to context or to our fall schedule.

On Date Day, everyone will meet at the shop at 2pm. Groups of 10 will form and head out, by bike and by foot, into the neighborhood. There are five businesses near the shop who agreed, for a commission, to host a group activity that will get people talking, tasting and moving.

I won’t bore you with the procedurals of how everyone gets to where they need to go. The point is to get together groups of people who are open to love and coincidence and who are willing to look for both in Little Saigon and its environs.

It’s the shop’s pleasure to organize an event centered on bringing love into the neighborhood.

Participating businesses are paid to host their events. Artists are paid commissions for fliers.

Temple Pastries, on Jackson and 27th, is planning to make special cookies with an ingredient identifying challenge in their bakery, with pastry prizes for the winner.

Big John’s Pacific Food Importers, on Dearborn and Rainier, will host an olive and cheese tasting session in their storefront, where you might purchase your after event picnic.

Dandelion Bikes, on Jackson and 18th, will offer e-bike test rides. These are recommended for groups of three, or for people looking to carry kids around in a cargo bike.

Krav Maga Central District, which is kitty corner to the shop in the Pacific Rim Center, will host an intro to self-defense class. Participants will have a chance to grow their confidence, which always is a winning trait.

Reclaim Clay Collective, on 8th and Weller, will host a ceramic fortune cookie painting session. The same might hang as ornaments on a tree this winter shared by a new love unit?

Once the events wrap up, we will meet in the neighborhood (location TBD) to raise a glass together — NA options available — and to give the fear of regret one last chance to drive people into each other’s arms.

“Tired” flier by khuyên, @junkyjunco

Register for the Dating Day at the Center for Bicycle Repair

For the first time, the shop is asking for volunteers to help staff this event. Volunteers can sign up here.

Volunteers will ride and walk with the groups to the activity sites. If there are bikes, the volunteer will releive their cohort from needing to worry about where to lock up.

Volunteers get a chance to make things so easy on participants that people in the groups won’t be able to help but see each other in a nicer light.

We hope you sign up, that you email with questions and that we see you on 9/20.

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Date Day Context

Why host a dating event in a bicycle shop? For me, past experience made this event inevitable.

On the one hand, the last person I dated, who now is my spouse, I met under circumstances that allowed me to give her a tour of a parking garage bike shop that myself and a couple friends had recently taken leadership of. I was proud: the shop had recently been burglarized. We took it as an opportunity to clean up and start fresh. That was 12 years ago and a world away. The possibility for love to bloom in a bike shop remains.

The recent histoy crime fighting efforts in the neighborhood is also important, contextually.

The designation of 12th and Jackson as a crime Hot Spot in 2022 was shortly followed by the arrival of a mobile precinct and with near round-the-clock police surveillance. Following an initial effort to clean graffiti, which saw the Mayor roll up his sleeves to repaint building facades, signs appeared banning buying and selling merchandise. SODA zones were ressurected. Police resorted to muscular sweeps that cleared sidewalks of foot traffic for weeks, only to see black markets resurge. A local effort to beautify the neighborhood relied on proposing crime-control architecture. More recently, CCTV cameras appeared on utility poles, equipped with microphones and speakers and monitored by SPD and AI. SDOT inaugurated a sidewalk foaming operation, now completed by contractors, analogous to outdoor pest control but practiced on humans. The city’s solution to Little Saigon’s so-called problems seems to rely on identifying and removing or neutralizing the people seen as trouble makers.

During the same period, the shop saw a single break in attempt, waged at 5pm on a Friday, so half-hearted that it qualifies as an act of destructive vandalism.

In place of the Hot Spot narrative, the shop organized actions that satirize, support, study and document the city’s crime control efforts: we turned no buy-sell signs into merchandize, hosted a CCTV reading group (whose work is forthcoming), joined the Friends of Little Saigon’s Pho Dep initiative and covered in real time, in this news letter and on Instagram, new initiatives as they roll out. The shop also protested by submitting damage claims to SDOT when it felt city initiatives were stiffling business.

There’s a term that describes this approach to crime control: broken windows policing. The term was coined in a 1982 essay by George Kelling and James Wilson. Wilson would go on to laud Seattle’s initiatives in this realm in a 1998 book, Fixing Broken Windows. The main thrust behind it is the idea that serious, violent crimes can be prevented by focusing police resources on reducing so called quality of offenses in places where local control is fraying. In Seattle, broken windows police has informed some aspect of the city’s collective approach to homelessness since the term was coined and policy efforts that relying on its logic find homes inside and outside the police department.

Many credit broken windows policing with ushering in the steep drops in violent crime that occurred in cities in the 1990s. Criticism of this claim seems inexhaustible.

The shop has never taken the position that things the neighborhood has no need for additional resources. Whether these resources should be committed almost entirely, in a word, to clear visible homelessness from the sidewalks is where the shop and city differ.

I remember in 2018, the same year the shop opened, reading an essay that argued that the broken windows explanation for crime declines in the 90s was unsatisfying at least in part because the drop occurred across Western cities, in places where broken windows policing was not on the menu. Broken windows could not explain what seemed like a cultural that occurred in cities, one catalyzed in part by people going out and dating. This is the essay.

Take the characters in Seinfeld, Sex and the City or the movie Singles. Millenials likely see them as stock, big city characters. People who lived through the violent 70s and 80s in urban areas would not have recognized them so easily. Because in cities where violent crime was a constant threat on the street, dating was not so easy. The essay suggests that dating helped, in a small and dynamic way, to relieve cities of violent crime.

The idea to host a dating might have remained just that if the shop had not received $1000 in compensation from SDOT due to damage caused to the shop by the foaming operation. Dating Day will see SDOT’s money returned to businesses in the area and at the same time try and present a narrative about Little Saigon where order and control are replaced by love and activity as the primary elements.

So Dating Day is also a way to present a theory about bike shops that is new to some but old to me: that they can be places where the bicycle serves mainly as a pretext for people to form and deepen relationships with eachother and neighborhoods.

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New Class Schedule and Drop In Hours

Starting on September 7th, the shop’s Sunday hours will change: intro classes will meet in the afternoon, from 1-3pm. From 10-12, the shop will offer drop in repair services.

Advanced classes will be taught on rotation and meet on Mondays, 6-9pm. The advanced classes offered are:

1. Drivetrains and bearings

2. Cables and Housing

3. Hydraulics

4. Wheel work: truing and tubless

We continue to revise the advanced class curriculum to support the Mechanic’s Certificate Exam, which we hope to offer in October.

See the full schedule and sign up here.

All drop in services are priced at $25 or $50. Here is a sample menu:

$25 includes parts and service for:

• brake pad (rim or disc) replacement

• fix-a-flat

• new handlebar wrap

• safety check with brake and shifting tune up

• brake component alignment (rim or disc)

• bike fitting

$50 includes parts and service for:

• New handlebar wrap + new cables and housing

• Brake bleed

• Install new chain

• Spoke replacement

• Tubeless Install (does not include tire)

• Resolving brake squealing

The ultrasonic cleaner will be on and available during the session. The shop’s full inventory will be available for purchase and includes seats, pedals, tires, brake pads and rotors, chains, cassettes, bearings, new and used components and more.

Thanks for reading, for subscribing, for signing up for classes, for spreading the word about Date Day and hopefully, attending the event yourself.