By Jacob Harkins •

How Katrina changed a cruiser culture

Mary Richardson didn’t know the scope of her photo project when she and her partner, Nicholas Costarides, began snapping pictures of the uniquely classic cruiser bicycles of New Orleans in late 2004.

Katrina hadn’t put things in perspective yet.

She thought the rusted chain guards, bells that took a little extra thumb pressure to make noise and the rest of the bicycles that were passed around like a round of Hurricanes on Bourbon Street made for striking art.

Each bicycle had a story to tell. “The bikes and the people are just really the same in that way; every time I looked at that bicycle I feel like I can see the person,” Richardson says.

Her book “New Orleans Bicycles” is filled with images of bicycles that had been riding around the Big Easy and dodging its enormous potholes for decades.

These cruisers had been part of numerous neighborhood parades, bar crawls (open containers are allowed in New Orleans) and commutes into the French Quarter for a shift at a bar.

What Richardson didn’t expect was that her book would become an obituary; the last, best witness to the oxidized Big Easy cruiser machines that would, only days later, be washed from the face of the earth forever.

Shortly after wrapping up the photo shoots late in the summer of 2005, Richardson moved to Atlanta with the job of editing the book looming, never suspecting that only a few days later a storm would change everything.

Hurricane Katrina blew through town, destroying levees, taking lives and leaving the port city under water.  Amid the mass destruction that saw entire neighborhoods ripped up, an American cultural icon and its people were changed forever.

It also decimated an irreplaceable collection of vintage bicycles. Jeff Shyman, a local historian and owner of Confederacy of Cruisers bicycle tours, estimates that more than 60 percent of the city’s bicycles were washed away during the storm.

“I lost my job, my house, the cat—and, oh yeah, I lost my bike,” says Ian McNulty, a Midtown New Orleans resident. “(Katrina) reset a lot of things. For a lot of people, New Orleans culture started over again.”

McNulty had a half-dozen bicycles essentially drown after the storm. One bike, a chrome Sun cruiser, survived. He later spent many lonely nights cruising through his blacked out neighborhood on it, researching his book, “A Season of Night.”

“I lived here during a very creepy period,” he says. “There were no lights and no people around, just packs of dogs. I thought ‘shit, I am going to ride my bike around.’”

The sub, sub culture

New Orleans itself is old and imperfect. There is charm and eccentricity at every turn with French Quarter balconies slanting to the left, row homes tipping a few degrees to the right and even estates in million-dollar neighborhoods showing more than a few spots of chipped paint.

The pre-Katrina New Orleans bicycle culture was no different. It was never defined by anything more than eccentricity, and perhaps a reluctance to buy anything brand new. The style and character was unspoken and undefined. It just was what it was.”

“The bikes were a reflection of us,” says McNulty. “It’s like ‘this is an old bike, it’s cool, it has style, it’s cheap. It’s unique; it’s my own little piece of New Orleans.”

Decades of buying and trading hand-me-down bicycles created a stock of cruisers that had more personality than Richard Simmons.

“Each bike passed through so many people,” Shyman says. “If each person leaves an indent on it, you have something unique.”

While the Mardi Gras floats get most of the attention, locals will tell you they have more
fun at their occasional neighborhood parades. They‘d dress up just the same, and often turn their cruisers into floats that were the center of attention.

People were even known by their rust-caked bicycles. “I knew that’s the one always parked in front of this bar or that, that’s the delivery guy’s bike,” McNulty says.

They brought the wrong kind of bikes

Following the storm, countless nonprofits and do-gooders in general pitched in, sending money, clothes, dry goods and even bicycles down to the weather-torn city.

But most of the bicycles that got sent to New Orleans were road bikes, townies, mountain bikes.  “They were hugely appreciated,” McNulty says, “but they weren’t the big fat cruisers we all loved so much.”

That’s not to say the bike culture is dead in New Orleans. It actually appears stronger than ever. It’s just different. It’s newer and more affluent looking.

New money has been pumped into the city with redevelopment projects popping up all over. Young professionals occupy neighborhoods formally the domain of a lower economic class, and a profusion of new bikes now roam the city that was once ruled by rusty classics.

“You can tell somebody who moved down here from another hip city up north,” Shyman says. “They are on road bikes these days—the roads are horrendous; nobody’s going far on a road bike. I still don’t see the point.”

But there is still hope for those who miss their beloved bikes. Taking advantage of New Orleans’ unbelievably flat streets and logical street grid, bikes are everywhere and more shops are carrying complete lines of cruisers, albeit new ones.

They just don’t have any rust on them. Yet. They haven’t been passed from person to person. Yet. But given time—the universal fix-all for disasters—that, too, will regain a level of normalcy. Luckily, one thing that hasn’t changed in New Orleans, and never will, is the weather.

“The flood destroyed a lot of bikes; the base of the culture was destroyed,” McNulty says. “But the spirit wasn’t broken. Now it’s more, newer bikes, but they are quickly getting weathered.”

What can do to help?

All three of these groups can use lots of support now that the excitement over Katrina has died down.

RUBARB (Rusted Up Beyond All Recognition Bikes)
they started as a volunteer community bike program right after Katrina, pulling bikes out of flood trash piles to fix up and get to struggling residents. rubarbike.org

Plan B a community bike program, they’ve been around since well before Katrina and were extremely busy right after Katrina gathering bike donations from other parts of the country to distribute to flood victims. bikeproject.org • 504-944-0366

Metro Bicycle Coalition This is the bicycle advocacy organization for the New Orleans region. mbcnola.org