From first timers to veterans, Saturday's Red Hook Bike Kill, a no-holds-barred bike celebration of mutant bikes, is often dubbed as one of the best days of the year by attendees.
For the past two decades, the Black Label Bike Club, a vagabond bike club originally from Minneapolis, has peddled their yearly Halloween mayhem around the city. The celebration still follows the "ask a punk" rule, where there's no address or promotion for the event, and information about it spreads through word-of-mouth.
Nonetheless, hundreds of people showed up to a desolate street near the Red Hook waterfront.
The daytime block party, which turns into an evening jousting match, is one of the last vestiges of New York’s punk scene, according to Mike Green. Green, who attended the event with his two friends Roy Arezzo and Chris Ryan, are part of the Electric Vikings, a biking club formed in 2002 that participated in the Warrior's Ride, a bike ride that follows the route the characters from the movie The Warriors made from Van Courtlandt Park in the Bronx to Coney Island.
All three dawned their neon vests, bedazzled with Christmas lights, animal pelt and their signature viking helmets.
Green, who has been coming to Bike Kill since 2003, explained that every year in September, Johnny Coast of the Bushwick bike shop Coast Cycles welds all kinds of mutant bicycles, like the chain handle bar bike or the bike welded on top of another bike, and then drops them off in Red Hook for the event.
The parade has migrated around the city over the years (it was once in Queens and another year it was in Bushwick), but for the past five years, it's been in Red Hook.
The bikes are scattered around for anyone with enough bravery, or liquor, to ride them. Neither the anarchy bikes, a bike with an anarchy "A" frame which “everyone goes nuts for” according to Ryan, nor the towering “tall bikes,” or even the lesser creations like the two children’s bikes welded together, are easy to ride.
The bikes wobble left and right, and riders fall off at rapid clip.
Attendee Andy Gittlitz called event “a relic of a different time in Brooklyn.”
“A time when the punks had a lot of cultural cache,” Gittlitz said. “When rents were lower, a time when there was a lot more room for creativity and there are other things besides Bike Kill that reflect that, of course, but it's beautiful to me that Bike Kill has hung on and insisted on staying pretty true to that ethic.”
For Rhonda McDonald, the anarchy bike is what pulls her.
“Every year is great and it gets better every time you get to see friends," McDonald said, beer in hand, debriefing her surroundings. “Look around you. Does this look watered down to you? Hell no, brother.”
