Freewheelers Bicycle Shop

You can come into our parking lot from the rear. Our side street is Elmerston. You can access it from Eastmoreland, which runs from Crittenden to Westmoreland. Between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., there may be some road work being done on Mt. Hope from time to time, resulting in delays.

From an interview iwth Matthew Crawford, author of SHOP CLASS TO SOULCRAFT in the Seattle Newspaper Real Change: You draw from your personal experience to demonstrate the reductive effect that our corporate and consumer culture has on the potential for human flourishing. What steps do you believe can be taken as individuals to reverse this trend, and to work toward a society that provides the opportunity to flourish for all of its citizens? It’s really thinkers in the Marxis...t tradition who have pointed out that one of the central imperatives of industrial capitalism is to separate thinking from doing, to take all of the craft knowledge that’s scattered in the heads of craftspeople and gather it into a central location, or a process, so that you can then replace those skilled workers with unskilled workers for lower pay. And so, that’s what happened to manufacturing one hundred years ago, with the advent of the assembly line, and that’s what continues to happen with all kinds of work today. The work of white collar professionals is the new frontier of that kind of dumbing down, that’s exactly what I experienced in the abstracting job. So the question becomes: what kind of work resists that kind of dumbing down, where you can exercise your capacities more fully? And I think the skilled trades answer pretty well to that desire. The physical circumstances in which you do those jobs really varies too much for the work to get reduced to simply following a set of procedures. It always requires improvisation and adaptability, and for that reason, you feel like a human being rather than a cog in a machine. So, in the book, I’m trying to kind of point out cracks in the system, as it were, where one can make a life for one’s self with work that has a certain dignity to it, and as I think one of your earlier questions suggested, if everyone took my advice, that would be a problem, because these cracks are small, and if they became much bigger, then wages would fall for that kind of work. So, the book is really offered in the spirit of advice whispered into the ear of a young person more than as a kind of blanket prescription for society. - Matt Crawford See more

Four locally owned full service bicycle shops have closed in the last 2 years. Five, if you include R Community Bikes. Park Ave. Bikes was sold to a Buffalo based chain in 2018[?] Here's a list of the remaining ones. (Shops that cater to the entire family) Please let me know if I've forgotten anyone. RVE in Fairport, Sugars in Spencerport, Bicycle Outfitters in Brockport, Freewheelers in the city, Towpath Bike Shop in Pittsford, Bike Zone in Greece, Full Moon Vista in the city, Mendon cyclesmith in Ionia.

Thoughts on travel by bike, bike shop meet-ups and friendship