Landmark LBS Closed

[George Schick]

I just happened to check into Harris Cyclery the other day to see if they had a certain component in stock only to find this announcement:

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/harris/

Apparently they closed back in June but I had not checked the website for a while and just discovered it.

I've purchased many bike parts as well as one complete bike from those people over the years and they were always very friendly and knowledgable.  Further, that shop was central to the famous Sheldon Brown.  Fortunately, it looks like the website and links to all of Sheldon's articles and advice is still up and running.

[Arthur Mayfield]

That’s sad. Without Harris Cyclery, we might never have had Velouria and the Lovely Cicycle blog, and I might not have found Rivendell (and would still be wandering around lost in Mirkwood). I hope others will take up where Harris Cyclery left off, for the benefit of the locals, at least.

[Willet Mather]

Glad I'm not the only one who misses Velouria and her Lovely Bicycles.  With sincere apologies to our own Jason F., I must say in all honesty that Velouria's (not her real name, we know) images of bicycles and bags and lugs and rustic stone cottages in the Irish countryside and wool sweaters (oooh, the wool!) are, collectively, the most beautiful picture stories I've seen anywhere on any topic.  The colors and the textures and the weather and the dramatic (imagined) backstories that arise from her compositions and her posing and facial expressions-- the whole package made me log in to her site every day for a month just to see the one posting that might show up during that time period.  She is (or was, I guess) the Dame Judi Dench of bicycle chronicling, who told more of a tale with each frown or gaze off into the distance than a hundred paragraphs of exposition could possibly explain.

I do hope she's found fulfillment knitting in front of woodstove and making patterns and raising a family in County Donegal or wherever else she currently calls home.  Best wishes to her and her family.

Willet M.

[Cyclofiend Jim]

Long, slow exhale.

Holding an eagle to the east in memory of an amazing person who left us too soon.
https://www.sheldonbrown.com/eagle.html

There was a phrase, before this list, before Rivendell was more widely known:
AASHTA

"As Always, Sheldon Has The Answer"

Back in the days of Usenet, when dealing with a technical cycling problem - heck, even building a wheel from scratch - was a 17th-level-mason-guild-craft-mysto riddle you had to solve through elusive scraps of information (and certainly no online videos), there was one person who consistently wrote copious, logical, detailed answers to technical bicycle questions: Sheldon Brown. 

He set the standard in assistance, all from the back room of this shop I'd never visited in Newtown Mass. Back in the days of dial-up. Rec:Bicycles:Tech (and a dozen other sub-topics in Bicycles) was an oasis and generations of riders owe him a serious debt. By his own admission, the Harris Cyclery folks let him tinker around and play on this crazy experiment of internet "discussion groups" long before it was widespread. But we are richer for those decisions. It has a lot to do with how riders became aware of stuff other than "what the pros ride!", learned the history of the sport and bicycles in general, and it coalesced the perspective of many of us who realized the sublime perfection of the bicycle in its most basic form. It is part of the foundation of this list, to be sure.

There were so many articles, you cannot scratch the surface - it was the original archive.
https://www.sheldonbrown.com/retroraleighs/history.html

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/tandems.html

He is the one who finally nudged me into trying a fixed-gear 
https://www.sheldonbrown.com/fixedgear.html
"Coasting is a pernicious habit"

His technical knowledge ran deep. No, deeper than that. His humor to his last days filled the world. One of my favorite chuckles was when he photographed Grant at the Bridgestone booth at the 2005 Interbike.

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/lasvegas/2005/

I feel very, very lucky that I am out of retail these days. Running a high service, knowledge-based store is a very difficult challenge when you can get stuff delivered in 4 hours from a warehouse across your state. Layer on that the constraints of doing business the last couple years and you have a very tough equation to solve. It's why remembering and supporting those quality organizations who hang in there is so important. 

I'll admit this hit me unaware. But, it has hit me. Didn't realize they had shuttered. 

I guess I'll go pour one out, as the kids say. Thank you Sheldon. Thank you Harris. You have blazed a trail and kept it clear. Now it's our turn to continue.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/24/metro/we-had-people-with-tears-their-eyes-west-newton-bicycle-shop-closes-after-70-years/

[aeroperf]

Thankfully, the Sheldon Brown website is continuing on.
His wife, Harriet Fell, and technical writer John Allen will keep it going.
Good interview here: https://outspokencyclist.com/2021/06/show-561-june-26-2021/

From the website:
“Reports of the demise of this Web site are greatly exaggerated! We at sheldonbrown.com thank Harris Cyclery for its support over the years. Harris Cyclery has closed, but we keep going. Keep visiting the site for new and updated articles, and news about possible new affiliations.”

[Craig Montgomery]

Hallejulah Jim. A great belated eulogy for a good man and teacher. I remember before Sheldon there were books (remember those?), one or two magazines, and some really great catalogues (Kitching/Cyclopedia). They really helped those of us who couldn't countenance the mod-stretch elastic racer dude mentality (Velo News? Meh). Proto-iBobbers. 

Just sitting here, some names come to mind, like Sloane, Ballantine, Forester, Cuthbertson. I still have a couple of Englishmen's books who wrote as if cycling was a culture, Nigel Spencer's The Art of Cycling and Reg Shaw's Let's Go Cycling (both from late 40'/early 50's).  Roger St. Pierre's The Book of the Bicycle ('73) and the Krause's (husband and wife) The Bicycle Book ('82). Bicycling (mag) was good way back when. We inhaled all this disparate knowledge from anywhere we could. Usually in magazine form, or from libraries (remember those?), or book stores. Then along came Sheldon and put a gigantic chunk of this knowledge between the Q and the M of our keyboards. He turned on many a light and quickly (at the speed of light). When I got my first real computer that could hook up with the net I would spend hours perusing him. It took a while for the wife to understand what was going on. She'd ask, "What are you staring at so intently?" I'd answer, "I'm mind-melding with Sheldon." 

Craig in Tucson