Best shot redux - bike photos - faber's cyclery

[Balloonatic]

I wanted to start a new thread under the previous one of "Take your best shot" with some photos I think you will all appreciate. The first are photos of the oldest, longest running bicycle shop on the west coast, Faber's Cyclery in San Jose, California.

The building started out as a saloon/speakeasy in 1884 with a brothel on the top floor, and by 1912 became a bicycle shop. It stayed a bicycle shop until April of 2013 when it very sadly burned down. I went to visit Faber's only months before it ceased to exist and shot the following photos. It is believed the black and white sign on the north side of the building is the original from 1912, but I was not able to confirm. The owner, Alex La Riviere was extremely nice to me and was quite knowledgeable about bicycles. He was excited to hear what vintage bikes I had, and eager to show me the underbelly of the place. I got the feeling he didn't give in depth tours too often but knew I was in love with vintage bicycles so he took pride in showing me the place.

One of the first things I noticed was the old wiring around the top of the walls at the ceiling. This was earlier than knob & tube wiring from the 20s, this was the very first wiring used when electricity came into use... bare, energized strung wire! There were also many old signs and the tool/parts drawers dated back to the teens. Also notice in some of the shots the original wall paper!

Outside were huge racks of frames, rims, and parts of all sorts, and inside were several vintage bicycles from the teens through the 50s, almost all in as found condition that had been in the shop since new, or nearly new.

I bought a set of Higgins rims, and a prewar seat from Alex and spent the day absorbing the vibes of a bicycle shop like no other. It makes my heart ache that it's gone now, but I'm grateful to have met Alex and seen Faber's in person with my own eyes before it disappeared forever. Please enjoy the photos.

Ballonatic O-O

 

[Balloonatic]

More Faber's

More Faber's photos...

 

[Balloonatic]

Last shots..

Some final shots of Faber's...

 

[rollfaster]

Amazing!!!!

Great old bike shop. It had to have been like a kid in a candy store feeling for you. Love that prewar schwinn and silver king. Great pics and thanks for sharing. Rob.

 

[barracuda]

People always referred to Fabers as "the oldest bicycle shop on the west coast," the implication being that there are older shops east of San Jose that might lay claim to the title of "oldest in the US." And I guess that's so. There's Bishops in Milford, Kopps in Princeton, Bumstead's in Ontario… these and other shops can certainly lay claim to being older than Fabers was, and in continuous running for over one hundred years, it's true, they can. But should you visit any of these storied establishments today, you'll find yourself gazing at maybe a commemorative plaque or photo on the wall extolling the history of the place, and then turning to look at lines of neat, new, pastel bicycles straight off the assembly line in Taiwan, the same bland, featureless experience you can get in most any neighborhood dealership across the country. I don't know about you, but my eyes glaze and my mind goes blank when confronted with rows of Giants and Specialized and Chinese Schwinns. I can think of few things more dull. I can get that in a WalMart sporting goods aisle or at the bland, local, placeless strip mall dealer. Personally, I'd much rather happen across a rust-eaten carcass in the woods than walk in the door of most bicycle shops.

Bicycles, for me, constitute a treasure hunt, a history lesson, and a cultural archeology on two wheels. I want cadmium. I want American steel. I want to see weird, discarded things I've never seen before, even a nut or a bracket, technological cul-de-sacs, outmoded old things that eat away at my insides til I know where they came from, what they went on, and what they did. And that's what Fabers offered, and more.

Do you see those racks of frames and wheels in the pictures above? Alex and Anthony almost never bought bicycles, you know. They could rarely afford to, and frankly did't need to. Nearly every morning for decades, when they awoke hungover and mostly broke, there'd be waiting for them outside the door on First Street a pile of bikes some local had decided they wanted out of their backyard. It was a well-known dumping ground. Around 1990 they had a pile of assorted bicycles in their yard which was literally three stories high. The pile was, for a time, a local landmark of it's own, a tumbling, gradually built sculpture that would stop foot traffic in amazement at the sheer massiveness of the thing. The pile was so dense it became a sort of ecosystem, populated by several species of indigenous Rodentia which sought refuge there from the urban crumble that was San Jose north of highway 280. It finally got so bad (or so good, depending upon your perspective) that the city cited them for the mess and they had to clear it away. So Alex found a Vietnamese gentlemen willing to give him one dollar per bicycle, and the Larivierre brothers and their drinking buddies spent several weeks loading the bicycles into what wound up being four large shipping containers - train car size - and the Vietnamese gentleman sent the bikes overseas to his village in Nam and set himself up a very nice local refurbishing and sales business. The rats, of course, simply went to ground, many of them finding a home in the labyrinthine Faber compound itself, particularly during the winter months of rain.

One wet October evening, not too long after the clearing out of the pile, Anthony and I were drinking whiskey late into the night in his part of the building complex. He lived in a squalorous room in the upstairs of the old, crumbling and smallish barn at the far western end of the structure, basically taking up there because it was as far away as he could get from Alex's place in the main house fronting First. (The brothers didn't alway get along well, most notably when they were in their cups, and the younger brother had been banished to the hinterlands of Fabers long ago during some especially rancorous period. He liked it that way, really.) The barn had long been notoriously rat-ridden forever, and to cope with it Anthony had strung wires across the beams of the high wooden ceiling and punctuated these wires with hanging rat-traps of a size big enough to handle the city rodents which were fairly constantly in evidence. The theory was that the rats would scuttle across the wires - which they did - and wind up snapped in the traps - which they were, much to the startled surprise of anyone who happened to be engaged in some activity (such as drinking or sleeping or looking at bike parts) in the room below. It could be unnerving, to say the least, to be awoken in the dead of night by the sound of a sprung trap just over your head and look up to catch the twitching death-throes of a two pound animal with bared teeth.

Anyway, as I was saying, we were drinking. And Anthony was showing off one of his guns to me. It was, if I recall correctly, a large caliber Colt, loaded, and he was as fond of it as gun aficionados are prone to be of their favored weapons which might be kept near the bedstand for security or other reasons. Anthony had a very large head, and it was perched necklessly on a short, stout body the shape of a whiskey keg. At times like these, in moments of pride or interest in a gun, or a rare bike part, or a stash of old rye, his eyes would gleam and a wide, crook-toothed smile would fill his expressive face. At that moment, as we looked at the gun - not the only one in the room, by far - we heard a rustling noise coming from above a forkless, chainless Pierce cushion frame which had always been stowed there, crammed between two wide spread framing members on the opposite wall. And crawling, about twenty-five feet from us, was a very large rat moving up towards the ceiling. The smile fell from Anthony's face, and without hesitation, instinctively it seemed, his hand holding the gun swung up and a shot cracked off, all in a mere moment of our registering the creature on the wall. I flinched at the unexpectedness of his response and the loudness of the report, I'll admit it, I did. But that was nothing to compare to the sheer revulsion we both experienced when we realized that not only had he hit the creature squarely mid-crawl, killing it, but that now, on the floor of the room, the contents of it's former belly were writhing in a pink and wet mass. The thing had apparently been pregnant. We looked at the mess with huge eyes, then we both turned and looked at each other and laughed our asses off. It was a good shot, and that called for another drink.

I do believe I've gotten a bit off the track of what I set out to say, something about the rare allure and historical presence that Fabers held in its dirty piles of ancient cycle detritus above other, perhaps older, bicycle shops. Ah well. Don't get me started.

 

[halfatruck]

What became of the inventory (was it lost in the fire?) and the owners (are they still in business?) ...great photos, especially the large Skip Tooth sprocket display..

 

[barracuda]

The inventory was sold to a collector (I don't know who) a few months before the fire when Alex finally gave up trying to get support from the city and the owners (the surviving Faber family) for his idea of making the place a landmark-status museum. Once Alex and Anthony left (they moved to Fort Jones, a small town in Northern California) the now-deserted place became a squat, hence the fire.

 

[SJ_BIKER]

i couldah been a contendah....

I had a shot at buying that 1936 motorbike a few years ago for under 1500.00.....doh....any how the new owner is rebuidling....

 

[bike]

Great story!

...


... But that was nothing to compare to the sheer revulsion we both experienced when we realized that not only had he hit the creature squarely mid-crawl, killing it, but that now, on the floor of the room, the contents of it's former belly were writhing in a pink and wet mass. The thing had apparently been pregnant. We looked at the mess with huge eyes, then we both turned and looked at each other and laughed our asses off. It was a good shot, and that called for another drink.

I do believe I've gotten a bit off the track of what I set out to say, something about the rare allure and historical presence that Fabers held in its dirty piles of ancient cycle detritus above other, perhaps older, bicycle shops.
Ah well.>>>>>>>>
Don't get me started.

PLEASE DO!

You can't buy this with money!

 

[37fleetwood]

when we stopped by there, (before the fire) I was afraid the building was going to collapse on us!
it had cables and turn buckles running from corner to corner! we visited it again shortly after the fire and were discussing the probability of it being an insurance type fire. you could tell they were kind of sick of the place and the brother who was there most of the time would trade you anything for a dime bag's worth of cash.
I was looking through my photos of the first stop by and apparently I was so un-impressed I didn't even take any!
here is one of it after the fire.