L.A. chain reaction

The Bicycle Kitchen occupies, yes, a kitchen. It overfills the remainder of a studio apartment too. Inside the air smells vaguely of perspiration, mixed with the mechanical scent of bicycle grease and the talc-rubber aroma of inner tubes. People are cooking here, but not dinner. Their conversations drown out music from a boombox. It is impossible to not be in the way.

Described figuratively instead of literally, the Bicycle Kitchen encompasses quite a bit more than these busy, cheerful rooms.

In the word-of-mouth way that a warehouse nightclub becomes the favorite hangout of the after-hours party crowd, or that a strip-mall cafe becomes a nucleus for the neighborhood, the Bicycle Kitchen has become a center of gravity and a source of energy for bicyclists in the core of urban Los Angeles.

Bicycles in the center of city life here? Except for true believers, the words seem strangely disjunctive, don’t they?

Southern California’s enduring love and fateful dependence on cars have been on constant display for all the world to witness for more than half a century. Motorcycles too.

But bicycles?

As usually happens, cliches are true enough. The motor vehicle is king, queen and court. But that won’t get you all the way down the road. Not anymore.

Southern California’s two-wheel culture spins on many spokes.

Sometimes it’s hard to miss the scene. Energetic “roadies,” with splashy Euro-style team jerseys and fanny-tight Lycra shorts, stream through Griffith Park or down Pacific Coast Highway in whirring pelotons. More numerous by far are the other cyclists who fade into the hectic background of city life. Hardly anyone pays attention, or really even “sees,” these rusty bicycles being pedaled on sidewalks or along gutters, one by one, as the immigrant poor seek out the dream but, for the moment, are priced out of every transportation alternative, including buses.

In between, spread out in the diffusion of urban bustle and noise, college students ride. So do playful teenagers on their acrobatic BMX bicycles. Here and there, commuters too. Customized choppers and sculpted beach cruisers make the point that slow is stylish. In the high-rise heart of the city, messengers scorch across the pavement with deliveries that cannot be transmitted by e-mail or fax. Racers follow madcap seasonal campaigns for velodrome, road and time-trial matches. More leisurely cyclists take to the concrete river trails and park paths year-round for fitness, for fresh air, for the sake of a family outing.

Then there are those who embrace the city head-on, like the cyclists who congregate at the Bicycle Kitchen. Borrowing freely from the cultures of messengers and commuters and road racers, they are the small but expanding community of, let’s call them, urban cyclists: They dare the crowded streets for the joy of it.

Some do it to save money on transportation. Some for the kicks. Some for the sociability. In the end, most do it because they believe it’s the right way, the only way, to connect with the city. In their determination, some are drawn here from smaller and less crowded places, because if you’re going to take on the chaos of urban life with a bicycle -- well then, Los Angeles is the promised land.

Jimmy LIZAMA, a Los Angeles native and a bicycle messenger, needed a place to work on his bike. There was an empty studio in the apartment building where he lives, the Los Angeles Eco-Village off Vermont Boulevard in Koreatown. He swept out the galley kitchen, hardly bigger than an elevator, and set up a work stand. Friends started to hang around and tune up their bikes.

Ben Guzman happened by, having just arrived from Portland, Ore., one of those cities where bicyclists do not ride in the civic shadows. Before he moved, his friends wondered what he was going to do with his bikes when he got to L.A., ha.

The two 30-year-olds talked. Their energy converged. Lizama wanted to do his part for the activist community at the Eco-Village, where self-propelled transportation is part of the creed. He didn’t like composting, so why not help them keep their bikes running? Guzman was looking to pump up the profile of bicycles in this city where the car rules but not always benevolently.

That was two years ago. They cleaned out the rest of the apartment. In the living area, they hung up some bicycle storage hooks. An open closet provided room for supplies and another work stand. Parts bins piled up against the walls.

From the beginning, it was standing room only. “I wasn’t the only one dreaming,” Lizama discovered. “Because a bunch of fools started showing up with bikes, beer, love, tall tales, music.... You know, culture.”

They instituted a call-ahead waiting list to keep things under control. Still, the crowd spills into the hallway on Tuesday and Thursday nights and on Sunday afternoons when the Kitchen is cooking. They are mostly in their 20s and 30s -- but not exclusively so; there are kids in the kitchen and splashes of gray hair too. Men outnumber women, but not by so many as you might think.

Bikes are repaired or tuned up. For those who need them, bikes are built-up from used and donated parts. “Now there’s so much more to it,” Lizama says.

Today, the Kitchen resembles nothing so much as a transplanted cubbyhole bicycle shop from a village in the mountains of the Pyrenees, except the background music isn’t opera. Conversations touch upon ball bearings, close calls, raucous night rides, the fond memory of seeing the most beautiful woman in the world ride off on her bicycle that night in London, the crush that women have on a soft-spoken former sheepherder whose bicycle journeys in the city are thought of as poetry -- the kinds of fraternal discussions that wouldn’t get you far at the office water cooler. Group rides, fun rides, through the city are organized out of the Kitchen or by friends of the Kitchen. “Yo,” says the greeting on its website. “You’ve arrived at the Bicycle Kitchen -- a cultural space dedicated to propagating bicycles as a way of life.”

Travelers from out of town and from abroad come because, well, how could they not? On a recent Tuesday, a couple from Switzerland showed up to repair her bike. Replace the “K” in Kitchen with a “B,” and that’s what they call women’s night. A race and party was held as a benefit, because the $7 an hour that cyclists donate for workshop time and help barely covers tools. Besides, how else could Lizama afford to make scratch pizza for all comers once a month?

“I’ve lived here 15 years,” says Randy Metz, a musician from Buffalo as he arrives Tuesday night. “For the first seven, it was difficult. Then I got a bicycle, and that’s really opened up the city for me.”

Aaron Salinger, a professional English/Spanish interpreter, wound up here after touring Mexico and living in the Northwest. Just riding a bicycle here, he understood, amounted to making a statement. “What’s exciting about biking in Los Angeles is that it’s Los Angeles. What happens at the Kitchen is a reaction to everything about L.A. -- cars, traffic, road rage. L.A. is where it’s important. In Portland if you get a bike lane, every one expects you to have a bike lane. If you get a bike lane here, it’s a big deal.”

Andrew Burridge arrived here recently from Australia. Enrolled at USC, he is seeking his doctorate in urban geography, the study of cities. He was accustomed to the car culture; back home in the suburbs of Melbourne there was no alternative way to get around. Even so, Los Angeles worried him. “I came prepared for the worst.”

Burridge ended up at the Bicycle Kitchen and built up a secondhand bike. He now commutes 45 minutes from Santa Monica to the USC campus. Each trip becomes a case study in the intimate life of the city. “I got a bike because I had environmental concerns. And there is the matter of economics, cost,” Burridge explains. “Probably most important, people who drive essentially forget about the city. From the freeway they can only see more traffic. I think I’ve learned a lot more about the place by choosing not to drive.”

Besides, he adds, “it has restored a lot of fun in my life.”

Marisa Bell, a physician, arrived from Boston and now helps organize monthly late-night rides to explore the streets and street-life of the city -- events that are called Midnight Ridazz. “When I found the Kitchen, I found my people,” she enthuses. “When I ride, I am truly free to see, taste, experience L.A. It’s crazy, but in this urban mess we’ve created community -- in every sense of the word.”

Somerset Waters, an electrician, supervises the Kitchen’s Earn-a-Bike program for young people. Kids up to high school age are given 10 hours of instruction in bicycle maintenance. Then one-on-one with an adult mentor, they strip and rebuild donated bikes for another eight hours. Some of the kids come at the urging of their parents. Mom or Dad may want them to get active and lose weight. Others show up on their own. In the end, they are rewarded with a hand-me-down frame and a chance to build up a bike they can keep.

“With bicycles, they are going to be financially ahead of the game, they are going to be physically ahead of the game,” Waters says. “We want them to see and understand how people have made bicycles important in their lives.”

Bicycles contribute more to the motions of the city than its image, sending up sparks of energy.

The Bicycle Kitchen is only the latest sign of it. During his term as mayor from 1993 to 2001, Richard J. Riordan, in his own be-happy fashion, brought a good deal of attention to bicycles here by pulling on a racing jersey and riding his. The 6-year-old Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, though many times smaller than equivalent organizations in some other cities, gamely seeks out support for bicyclists and bicycle facilities.

Virtually everyone engaged in the matter vouches for the growth in bicycle use and bicycle activism, and certainly for the added attention to the argument that bicycling can help relieve the ever-growing ails of congestion.

“Among government officials who truly shape our community, we see more organic discussion of bikes, more consideration of bikes,” says Kastle Lund, executive director of the county Bicycle Coalition. “They’re thinking of bikes in ways they didn’t 10 years ago.”

This autumn, after a yearlong study of bicycle use in the region, the coalition and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority agreed to cooperate on an outreach effort to give “traditionally disenfranchised communities,” namely the poor, a greater say in planning for the future of bicycling here.

Those who view their tires as half inflated rather than half flat are happy to note that there are plenty of other cities less accommodating to cyclists -- just look at Houston, for instance. And never mind the political climate. Southern California has something just as important. “We have the weather itself and the geography,” says the coalition’s planning and outreach coordinator, Matt Benjamin.

Next June, Los Angeles will become the seventh city in North America chosen as the site for the free-for-all celebration known as “BikeSummer.” Clubs, organizations, activists and enthusiasts are being solicited to dream up events to promote bicycling -- rides, film screenings, races, parades, workshops, whatever. Festivities are to run through July 4.

Never before has a city without a national reputation as bicycle friendly been asked to throw this annual bash. “It’s a chance for all the various bike cultures in the city to meet and understand each other,” explains Matt Ruscigno, an organizer. “And it’s a chance to showcase all these cultures for noncyclists.”

Count the Bicycle Kitchen in for the party.

“If we pull this off as big as we want to pull it off, it will be unprecedented,” says Guzman. “When the gutter punks come together with immigrant workers, when the Eastside meets up with the Westside -- it’s going to be revolutionary. When people start seeing fun happening in their neighborhood, that’s when they’re going to want to join in.”

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Next: The thrill of traffic.