B $ B

BY R. ANTHONY HARRIS PHOTOS BY LARRY KONG & MYLES BROWN

Let’s just go down the line. State your name and what you do.

Illya:

My name is Illya. I’m 20 years old. I do residential infrastructure HVAC, I’m an apprentice. And I ride bicycles with these guys. They taught me that riding bikes can mean slowing down around the homies and taking your sweet time with the ride. I thought that was really cool.

Amon:

I’m Amon. I’ve been biking with Broad Street Bullies for a while. During the pandemic, everything got started. I mainly film the Broad Street boys’ ride. I love that aspect of it– just being on the scene, capturing everyone. Capturing a glimpse of the ride-out every week.

Miles:

I’m Miles. When I first was invited on a ride-out I didn’t know how I felt about riding bikes. But once I started riding my bike, it became that stress relief that I needed from everyday life. And I think I’m so attracted to it because I do work in community psychology and Broad Street Bullies is that work. Everyone can forget what they’re doing at home and just ride bikes for two hours, not even worrying about the chaos of life. I have been through a lot of shit these past two years or so. But now these are the homies, and these are my brothers for real.

Bradley:

My name is Bradley. One thing that I’d like to talk about is how I got into bike culture. When I started riding, about six years ago, I was going to VCU at the time. I was looking for a job. I ended up meeting a few dudes that were couriers for Quickness RVA. Our homie Jay actually helped to start it.

He can’t be here because he’s over teaching in Thailand. He’s been there for about two years now. But he got me into Quickness and I was a courier for like a week. Rip Robin. They were another cyclist who is unfortunately gone now.

They were in New York when they passed away from an unfortunate incident, But Robin was a big part of the scene for me. I met Salad at Robin’s Memorial ride-out. I saw him popping it up– doing wheelies at the memorial. At that moment, I wanted to learn how to wheelie, so we all started hanging out.

Salad:

I’m Salad. I was there at the beginning. I’m a founding member if you want to say that. I’m born and raised in Richmond and grew up skateboarding.

When the pandemic happened and everyone was suddenly outside, we started going to MDP to meet up and ride around. The bike life scene reclaimed itself with the pandemic. So we were just like, yeah, let’s do a ride-out in Richmond. In New York, Philly, Miami, and all over the West Coast, they do ride-outs. I would see videos on my Instagram of groups of 800 kids all riding out together. I knew we could do that here. I was connected to a lot of people that did Critical Mass who have been in the Richmond bike life scene since the 90s. I can’t step on toes, so we had to schedule it around their rides, but what makes us different is the wheelies. And we were filming.

Our first ride-out was in October 2020, I think on Halloween. But it wasn’t until the spring of 2021 that it really started to solidify as something that wasn’t going away. And it was still only around 30-40 people. Amon is the BSB filmer, everyone knows that by now. He was making that stuff look good.

That definitely got people talking about Broad Street Bullies.

Is it weird to think about the fact that this started as a bunch of homies hanging out and riding bikes compared to now, where you’ve been asked to talk at VCU and there is a government conversation going on about the future of urban planning in the city?

Salad:

We have obligations to uphold, but luckily, there are so many people outside of BSB that are focused on the bike lane part of biking. We can help, and we can repost stuff, but that is not our specialty– politics. The whole goal of this was to build a platform. And this is way bigger than bikes. This is for the city. This is for the music culture.

So many people at the rides have different skills. There may be an electrician or something saying, “Yo, I heard you talking about needing some lights fixed at your house, I got you.” The real thing that I try to focus on is the underground scene. Because in Richmond, people don’t like to be friends with each other. There’s so much gatekeeping going on. People try to not help each other out.

Whereas here, it’s just like, come ride. You need some help with something? I guarantee you, there’s someone here that can help you out. Almost all my friends know someone that knows someone that does major stuff. That’s the community aspect of it.

Bradley:

Exactly, we’re a community of people that support each other, no matter what they’re doing. I mean, we have artists, we have musicians, photographers, cinematographers, contractors, and builders. I have seen people get jobs from contacts that they’ve made at the Broad Street Bullies ride-outs.

That’s the main aspect of BSB that sets us apart from everybody else. You have all these other activities going on in the city of Richmond and– no disrespect to other bikers– but it’s not a community event. When you go to these different bike rides, for the other groups, you’re expected to ride a certain way. You’re expected to carry yourself a certain type of way. And with Broad Street Bullies, there’s so much freedom to do what you want.

Salad:

Just don’t hurt anyone else. Respect people and don’t be an asshole.

Amon:

Everyone can do whatever they like to do as long as it doesn’t damage someone’s property or affect anybody’s safety. That’s all we care about.

Riding together is such a simple message and idea. I have to ask, where do you think the negativity comes from?

Illya:

I think people are mad because they have a sense of entitlement. You got to understand that a lot of the overwhelming amount of negativity that comes from people online is usually from people that have gotten stuck in the car behind us. People don’t think we have a place on the road because we’re cyclists. We’re on bicycles and they’re in cars. They drive in 8000-pound vehicles where they’re safe, and they have airbags, and we have four feet and pedals and brakes. Some of us are lucky if we got brakes.

It’s a sense of entitlement. You think because you’re in a car, the road belongs to you. But there’s safety in numbers. Broad Street Bullies promotes riding safely in a group that rides at a pace of 10 miles an hour. All we ask of people that drive cars is to just give us a little bit of patience. At most, you’ll sit for about two and a half minutes for us, and then the light will turn green, and your life will continue. We’ll continue on our merry way and you can go on about your day, we don’t have to be negative.

I think now would be a good time to give a shout-out to other DIY initiatives that led to this in some way– Critical Mass, Slaughterrama, Best Friends Day. As long as I’ve been here in Richmond, it’s always had this homegrown energy, and now we have Broad Street Bullies.

What happens this summer if you get three or four hundred people on a ride-out?

Salad:

We’ve got a couple of rides coming out. We’re ready for it. I’m gonna try to get all these kids from New York, Philly, and Miami to come here and do a big Broad Street Bullies ride for the bike life scene.

Bradley:

There’s one more thing that we missed. We do kickball games every first Sunday of the month. baseball games. Sometimes we do wiffle ball. Everyone is invited– kids, adults, old people, cats dogs.

Salad: Red Bull is also about to start sponsoring the rides. So we have friends that have food trucks, friends that make music, and want to play shows. At the end of the rides, because we end in Oregon Hill, we’re going to hopefully have a food truck there every Thursday. This will probably get going in the summer and we also might have artists perform at the lookout. We did it once before, and it’s just like all off of the strength of the homies.

I want to shout out Jay, Aiden, Nick, Sophia, and Ryan and Christian who broke their knees. Shout out to everyone that is has supported Broad Street Bullies and do little things that most people don’t know about. We know who the real ones are. We couldn’t do without you.

Illya:

And stay positive. There’s power in a positive mental attitude with all the fucked up shit in the world. For an hour and a half, we can just comfortably ride our bikes at a slow pace, share some smiles, laugh, and have empathy and compassion for each other.

@BROADSTREETBULLIES804

I’m here with Brandon and Thomas from The Jasper. We’ll start off easy. Where did you guys meet?

Thomas: We met around 2005, playing in bands together. Then we both ended up at the Roosevelt in 2011.

Brandon: I came on as a server at first and eventually got behind the bar.

Thomas: I had come from Six Burner restaurant and had worked with Lee Gregory there. He was a part of opening the Roosevelt and he brought me along. I had dabbled in cocktails at Six Burner, but I wanted to really push forward and try to make cocktails a part of what the Roosevelt was.

I don’t know if it was the time, the location, or maybe just the attention we were receiving in general, opening that place. It seemed like night and day, all of a sudden, people were interested in cocktails and asking about them.

Brandon: When we opened the Roosevelt, I don’t think anybody had a clear idea of what that restaurant was going to be. It was so much more casual when we first opened. And Balliceaux obviously, was the nightlife place–outside of Balliceaux, you wouldn’t get cocktails unless you were at a nicer restaurant. Putting out a really interesting cocktail menu in a place that was so casual was pretty uncommon in Richmond, or anywhere really in Virginia.

When did working at the Roosevelt turn into wanting to open the Jasper?

Brandon: There was a point at the Roosevelt when we decided that we didn’t want to only have eight to 10 drinks. We wanted to do 20. We completely blew out this cocktail menu for a 10-seat bar. And the restaurant was gaining momentum in the press– we were busy all the time, more so for the food. But at some point, we started having