Velospace.org, a remembrance

I've been meaning to write this for a while. I spent a good deal of time
on velospace.org between 2009 and 2014; learned
a lot, shared what I knew, and was inspired on a daily basis by the
artistry and ingenuity that was posted there. While it has been
essentially dead the past 10 years, it will never be truly gone.

I'm going to assume the vast majority of folks who read this either
aren't familiar or have only seen the site via an image search (Custom
Hybrid Yamaguchi anyone?). So,
Velospace was pretty much the original hub for amateur bike geek
dopamine. It was launched in 2006 by a young lawyer from Chicago named
Greg Smith. At the time most of the spots to see and talk about bikes
online were pure forums (MTBR, BikeForums, Retrobike), and were not
designed for easy browsing, and were not photo-forward. Not
inspirational, more conversational. Greg instead imagined Velospace as
MySpace, but for bikes — post a few photos, and describe the bike in as
much or as little detail as you want. Other users could make comments,
"friend" other bikes, create clusters featuring stuff like Wald
products,
purple, or
Voodoo.

The site was designed to diminish judgement and gatekeeping, so there
were lots of cheap commuters, stock builds,
repaints,
mods, restorations, and
frankenbikes. Mountain, road,
commuter, tall, short, long, teeny.
As it grew, the site gained a large following within the burgeoning
fixed gear community. Lots of Kilo TTs, Pistas, GTBs, but also builds
which took those bikes to new
heights. Everything was welcomed and
appreciated.

What I loved most about Velospace was the community Greg built. The
forum was full of questions, build
journals,
prototypes, articles, and (probably) best of all, the Best (worst) of
Craigslist Bikes thread.
People came to geek out, get inspired, or share some crazy idea they
had. A friend and I moderated the forum when it became too much for
Greg. We tried to keep it calm, comfortable and balanced. It went pretty
well.

As time passed, the weak links in the site's dated coding began to show.
Images began to break, features began to slowly degrade. Greg kept
things taped together for a good six years, but life was busy and he
decided to sell the site to an outdoor website conglomerate in 2012. The
thinking was that they would put the work into the site to get it where
it needed to be and continue to improve upon the model. They did not.
Nor did the next owner. By 2014, the about 90% of the site's photos were
broken, and have remained that way since.

This sub and some others kind of scratch the itch for me. Lots of
artistry and ingenuity, but also a healthy dose of the same things over
and over and having to check six bloody subs every day. Don't get me
wrong, I'm glad to be here, but I miss the passion I felt oozing out of
Velospace.

Were you there? HMU.

suicide_doors

Featured bikes, clockwise from top left:

First collage:

Second collage:

Third collage:

by Beyond_0451