Bicycle Kitchen (Los Angeles)
The Bicycle Kitchen / La Bicicocina is an educational non-profit bicycle workspace in the Los Angeles neighborhood of East Hollywood.[1] The Bicycle Kitchen serves and is served by its community, providing a place where people can use tools to empower themselves as bicycle mechanics. The Bicycle Kitchen promotes a do-it-yourself attitude to recycling and reuse. The educational experience is entirely hands-on and any instruction arises out of the interactions between clients and more knowledgeable volunteers. The Bicycle Kitchen also has a strong social aspect where strangers discover shared purpose and mutual respect.
The Bicycle Kitchen is entirely run by volunteers and is supported by small individual donations from its everyday clients. Some clients support the Bicycle Kitchen through cash donations while many others donate their time and effort to help clean and organize the space. The community's continuing generosity means that no one need be turned away simply for lack of funds.
The Bicycle Kitchen shares the culture of many traditional Bicycle Cooperatives and many of the most dedicated volunteers at the Los Angeles Bicycle Kitchen have been members of bicycle cooperatives in other parts of America and around the world.
New volunteers are constantly joining the Bicycle Kitchen and while a knowledge of bicycle mechanics is helpful to volunteers it is not essential. The only real prerequisite is the willingness to engage with people of all backgrounds in a constructive and supportive way.
Volunteering at the Bicycle Kitchen is not only a way to find and connect with individuals who are like minded and share your interests, but also it might help you to bridge across social divisions and to repair some of the damage caused by pervasive and ever increasing market driven social stratification.
The Bicycle Kitchen is part of a larger do-it-yourself movement and shares many aspects of maker culture and open source culture.
Visiting The Bicycle Kitchen
The Bicycle Kitchen is located at 4429 Fountain Ave in East Hollywood, two blocks south of the large intersection where Hollywood Blvd. and Sunset Blvd meet.
It is South of the Vons on Virgil, and West of Sunset Nursery and Akbar on Fountain.
The closest subway stop is Vermont / Sunset on the Red Line. Walk one block South and two blocks East to reach the Kitchen.
Because the Bicycle Kitchen is run by volunteers with changing schedules, it does not always open on time. It doesn't hurt to call ahead to ask if they are open.
The phone number is (323) 662-2776, but the phone is normally only answered when the Kitchen is open.
Please understand that the Coronavirus Pandemic has significantly changed Bicycle Kitchen's hours of operation.
The Kitchen is currently open for just a few hours per week until the situation stabilizes.
History
The name "bicycle kitchen" is a version of the more common term "bike kitchen" which is a popular name among community bicycle organizations. However the LA Bicycle Kitchen has played no small part in popularizing the name throughout the globe in the past decade. The origins of Los Angeles' Bicycle Kitchen date back to 2002, when a tiny bicycle repair workshop was set up in an unused apartment in an intentional community known as the Los Angeles Eco-Village. Jimmy Lizama, a resident and local bicycle messenger, cooked and encouraged others to join him for evenings of bikes, pizza, and beer. Soon other kindred spirits joined the group among them Ben Guzman, Aaron Salinger and Randy Metz. In the following year, the bicycle kitchen became a community resource and a local hot spot for bicycle enthusiasts.[2]
By the winter of 2004, the small space could not accommodate the number of people attending, so the loosely organized group of volunteers decided to find a different space and to become a collectively run non-profit organization. [3]
In 2005, Ben Guzman signed the lease that brought the Bicycle Kitchen into the forefront of the public's eye by moving it from the confines of the Eco-Village storefront at Melrose and Heliotrope. The neighborhood that the Bicycle Kitchen moved into was in rapid transition quickly became filled with like-minded supportive entrepreneurial young businesses, namely: Scoops (ice cream), Pure Luck (vegan food and beer), Vlad the Retailer (craft items, venue), and Orange 20 (boutique bicycle shop).
In 2010, after years of successive rent increases at their location in what was coming to be called "The Bicycle District" and fearing that the Bicycle Kitchen might get priced out of the neighborhood it became clear that the bicycle Kitchen should purchase a building.
In May 2012, after a very successful fundraising campaign, the Bicycle Kitchen was able to move into a larger space only 1.4 miles away from their beloved old neighborhood. Their new home is in a former sapin-sapin bakery at 4429 Fountain Avenue.[4]
References
- "Bicycle Kitchen". Bicycle Kitchen. Archived from the original on 2010-03-10.
- Bike Culture: Spokes People, Los Angeles Magazine
- Vontz, Andrew (May 2006). "The Strange Case of the Visionary in the Bike Shop in the Kitchen". Bicycling Magazine.
- "A Look at the Bicycle Kitchen's New Digs". Elsongeles. June 7, 2012.
Los Angeles Times Magazine, November 2, 2003 https://web.archive.org/web/20140812192155/http://andrewvontz.com/los-angeles-times-bicycle-kitchen-nov-2-2003/