Win a Free Bike!

If you, like me, missed Open Streets last Saturday, you might still want to take your shot at winning a free bicycle. Bicycling Magazine will be giving away free bikes on August 14. To enter the contest, all you have to do is submit a very short essay about how a new bike could change your life. You can submit your essay here.

Bicycling's Lois Moss sent a message today saying she had gathered a number of entries from women during Open Streets, but not so many from men. Fellas, it's not too late to step up. Good luck to all.

West Town Bikes/Ciclo Urbano Opens on Paseo Boricua

Photo by Alex Fledderjohn.

West Town Bikes has found a new home at 2459 W. Division, just west of Western at the eastern end of Paseo Boricua. Hundreds of urban bikers, youth and residents of West Town and Humboldt Park turned out on Friday night to celebrate the grand opening of the new space, which will house a retail store as well as more space for West Town's well-known workshops in bike mechanics and training programs for youth in bike repair and safety while riding.

Longtime educator, advocate of Puerto Rican independence, and neighborhood leader Jose Lopez spoke during the opening ceremonies, welcoming Ciclo Urbano to the neighborhood and emphasizing how the new venture builds on the existing community. "Ciclo Urbano...is the very idea we can incorporate bicycling into Fiesta Boricua. We can integrate the experience of bicycling with tours of our murals." Lopez reminded the crowd that building community "cannot be [done] by erasing our history, erasing our murals, erasing and criminalizing our youth. ... There's a different way to build community."

Photo by Antonio Figueroa.

West Town Bikes has shown the way, bringing together a diverse group of bicyclists and reaching out to youth in underserved communities. Plus, they know how to throw a great party. Watch for more sights--and great sounds--from the opening festivites over at the New Communities Program web site.

Humboldt Park's Ciclo Urbano from Tu Multimedia on Vimeo.

Three neighborhoods. No cars.

Chicagoans on bicycles, skates and sneakers will take to the streets this weekend for the second Sunday Parkways event as portions of the city's boulevard system are closed to auto traffic. The first such event on October 5 was a huge success with thousands of happy participants and this Sunday's version – running through East Garfield Park, North Lawndale and Little Village – is bound to be just as good.

It's from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday. See the route here.

Brooklyn videographer Nicholas Whitaker talked to several of the event's organizers and posted his piece on Vimeo, which is where I found it this morning. It features Jaime de Leon and Cristina Bronsing of Little Village Community Development Corp. and Adolfo Hernandez of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, who talk about the civic benefits that such events have brought to cities in Latin America.



Chicago Sunday Parkways from Nicholas Whitaker on Vimeo.

For more videos of ciclovia events in Chicago; Bogota, Colombia; Quito, Ecuador; and Guadalajara, Mexico, check out chispacechicago.ning.com

Strolling and rolling on Sunday morning

A family enjoys the car-free boulevard. Photos by Gordon Walek.

Chicago launched Sunday Parkways this morning and thousands came out on their bikes and on foot to enjoy traffic-free boulevards in Logan Square, Humboldt Park and East Garfield Park.

I've been viewing videos about these ciclovia events in other cities and they seem to be a transformative opportunity for our city. Imagine thousands of people, including many families with young children, strolling and rolling down the streets and stopping to chat with others -- all in a big-city environment. It feels good.

And it happened this morning in Chicago for the first time. When I arrived at the Humboldt Park Boat House, a techno beat was booming from loudspeakers and two dozen people -- including many children -- were following three instructors doing a kick-boxing exercise. Others stood around straddling their bikes or chatting with each other. Smiling.

"I'm elated right now," said Miguel Morales of Community Organizing for Obesity Prevention in Humboldt Park, who helped organize the activities. The Greater Humboldt Park Community of Wellness had sponsored two earlier En Movimiento events in the park this summer, but this worked even better because it brought so many people to the park, he said.

Farther south I ran into Rishona Taylor of the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance. She was happy that the second event, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Oct. 26, will cover the same East Garfield territory but run south this time through North Lawndale and Little Village. See the route here. "I learned a few things," she said, "like next time we're going to cluster the activities a bit more" because the crowds prompt even more people to stop and participate.

A story in this morning's Tribune quotes the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation's Adolfo Hernandez, who says that if this year's events are a success we may do more of them next year. Let's make sure our political leaders and neighborhood organizations realize that we want these events and we want them more often -- every week or at least twice a month during the warm months, so that they become a routine for many thousands of Chicagoans.

Do you have photos or video of Sunday Parkways? Please share it with others by joining the new chispacechicago.ning.com site and posting there (or linking via YouTube or Flickr). Thanks.

An experiment in global networking

Photo by Gordon Walek

A group of Chicagoans traveled to Quito, Ecuador, two weeks ago to learn about the Latin American phenomenon of ciclovias, the closing of city roads on Sundays to open them up for cyclists, pedestrians and healthy family activities.

Thousands turn out for these events in Quito; Bogota, Colombia; Guadalajara, Mexico; and other cities, and this weekend Chicago is getting in on the action with its first Sunday Parkways event, running from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on five miles of the city's boulevard system. See the route here.

How do you learn more about how these things work? Going to Quito for the Third Annual conference of the Ciclovias Unidas de Las Americas was a great way to start. I'm told that the Chicago contingent of community leaders, biking activists, police and city officials got some seat-of-the-pants experience on borrowed bikes, and made plenty of new contacts. (The trip was funded by the MacArthur Foundation's International Connections Fund, for this very purpose.)

But we want to keep things going, so we've launched a global networking experiment with a web site that allows anyone who wants to join in and post related videos, photos, discussion and questions. Check it out here, and please sign up and start contributing, including your impressions and videos or photos from the Sunday Parkways events on Oct. 5 and 26. Join us.

Soggy Tourists in Our Own Town

Last Saturday, 21 of us braved the record-breaking rain for the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation's Veggie Bike and Dine event. The event raised money for CBF and for NeighborSpace, which manages land for community gardens across Chicago. The event wound through a number of NCP neighborhoods and got me thinking about the potential for events like this to help neighborhoods snag more tourists in their own town.

We met up in Pilsen, at the Xochiquetzal Peace Garden, created by Whittier School. Signs in English and Spanish pointed out herbs like manzanilla/chamomile. Soy Organic, Pilsen's only organic grocery store, provided a yummy breakfast shake to rev up our metabolisms. We came from Ukrainian Village, West Loop, Oak Park and even the south suburbs, just to name a few.

It wasn't too wet on our way from Pilsen to North Lawndale, by way of Little Village and the Farragut High School parking lot. We arrived in time to watch our snack being made at the Green Youth Farm at 3539 W. Ogden, near the Pink Line Central Park stop. There we had salsa fresh from the garden: red and yellow tomatoes, garlic, cucumber all picked and chopped before our eyes. Teen tour guides from Manley and Collins Academy high schools showed us what they'd been growing all summer in the extensive network of tall raised beds built back in 2005. The salsa was the best I've had all summer, hands down.

Afterwards, we were treated to a special tour of a recently redone community garden nearby. At this point, it was pouring pretty hard and my vision narrowed to the bike in front of me, so I still don't know where in North Lawndale we ended up, but we got to see a newly paved garden featuring pear trees with fruit ready to pick.

Later, we biked through giant puddles in Garfield Park and admired the Conservatory's demonstration gardens. Finally, we visited El Yunque Community Garden in Humboldt Park and Frankie Machine Garden in Ukrainian Village. In the end, we all dried out and enjoyed vegan pizzas at Crust: Eat Real.

All the way along, people on the street cheered and waved at the sight of the soggy cyclists. We had plenty of room for guests at the afterparty, since about half the bikers didn't show, so some of the stalwart community gardeners who turned out to show us their work came and joined us for pizza.

Events like these, whether a 12-mile bike tour or a chamber of commerce restaurant crawl, really help outsiders get the feel of a neighborhood. Here's to sunnier days and more bikers in the group next year!

What do bikes have to do with it?

Photo by Amadi Jordan-Walker

Daley Plaza was transformed by a sea of bicyclists last Friday morning as early morning commuters converged at Washington and Dearborn for the culmination of Bike to Work Week.

So what does that have to do with community development? More than you might think.

1. The biggest cheers from the crowd, when awards were being announced, were for Alex Wilson, the co-founder of West Town Bikes. Alex and Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation started the very successful BickerBikes program that puts tools in the hands of local youth and teaches them how to fix up broken bikes and then ride them around town. It's a great program that continues to broaden horizons for kids in Humboldt Park and other neighborhoods.
2. Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail was represented in one of the booths by its new executive director Julia Kim, who spoke enthusiastically about that group's efforts to transform an abandoned above-grade rail line into a unique east-west biking and walking trail. The trail will run between two park-short neighborhoods, Humboldt Park and Logan Square, and land is being assembled at various access points to provide mini-parks with ramps up to the trail. This will be huge for Chicago and those neighborhoods when it gets built.
3. Neighborhood organizations and the city will launch Sunday Parkways in October, shutting off automobile traffic on boulevards through five neighborhoods (Logan Square, Humboldt Park, East Garfield, North Lawndale and Little Village) to encourage residents and families to get outside for healthy activities. This idea has been very popular in several Latin American countries and has strong support from local community development corporations including Bickerdike and the Logan Square Neighborhood Assn.

One of the awards went to LISC/Chicago's executive director Andy Mooney, in recognition of LISC's support of these efforts. In his short speech, Mayor Daley pointed out that biking, walking and public transit are all essential elements of making Chicago a more vibrant and livable city. Local residents have the same idea, as they've outlined numerous projects along those lines in the New Communties Program quality-of-life plans, from walking clubs for health to "walking schoolbuses" for safe passage to school, to new CTA and Metra rail stations, to more biking and athletic programs for youth.

What do bikes have to do with it? Plenty.