BUILDING HIS RIDE

You’ve probably never heard of Rone, but in the BMX biking universe he is a superstar. He is featured in eight BMX riding videos, and in magazine ads for his sponsors, Animal and Redline. He has his own set of top-selling signature handlebars, which he designed.

His sponsors shower him with free bike parts and attire, and send him $500 every month. For a kid, those rewards were a gift for doing the thing he loved most. But at the age of 25, Tyrone is going into business on his own, opening New York City’s first BMX shop. Rone feels it’s his duty. Skateboarders have shops and places they can go to, but BMX riders don’t. They order much of their gear over the internet. “A lot of times even though kids are ordering stuff they might now know what they’re ordering,” Rone explains.

And so he recently quit his job as assistant manager at the Varick Street outpost of the Metro Bikes chain of stores to open up his new storefront on Division Street. He hopes Dah Shop will be a place of protection for city kids—just as Ace Cycles in Flatbush, on Cortelyou near Westminster Road, was for him when he was growing up in Brooklyn.

Williams chose Division Street, where Chinatown meets the Lower East Side, for its proximity to two important riding spots for New York’s BMX scene—the Manhattan Bridge Skate Park, which sits comfortably under the bridge in Chinatown, and the little plaza on Bowery right before Pearl Street, where a statue of Confucius keeps watch.

“It’s gonna be a bike shop, a place where kids can come and hang out, watch videos, talk, ask questions and just have it a little better than I did,” Rone said. He speaks from personal experience. After hanging out at Ace Cycles he began working there when he was 14, the first time was able to make money doing the thing he loved.

Tyrone still lives in Flatbush, just two blocks where his mother still lives in the apartment where he grew up, on the corner of Parade Place and Parkside. They’ve been in the neighborhood since he was 3, when they lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Crooke Avenue with five other relatives. They’d come from Jamaica, where his father remained with three half-siblings.

Lined with closely clustered brick apartment buildings, the streets here in the heart of Flatbush are filled with locals hauling heavy loads of laundry and grocery bags, and children who spend time hanging around in clusters on the streets, and in the baseball fields and basketball courts of Parade Grounds next to Prospect Park.

When he first started riding he and his friends Cordell and Newton built little jumps in the dirt in Prospect Park. Then they’d find an empty spot like a parking lot and ride it for hours doing small tricks like 180s—when a rider jumps 180 degrees—and peg feebles, in which a bike’s back peg grinds on a ledge with the front tire used for support. But with BMX, the city streets had more to offer than the parks. At Caledonian Hospital on Parkside, Rone would jump his bike up onto a long ledge. Doctors at Caledonian knew Tyrone well. He went to them for his asthma, or because of a twisted ankle or broken wrist.

Caledonian closed several years ago, and even its ledge is now inaccessible, tucked behind a fence. A real estate developer bought the building last year. But Tyrone’s roots are well established in his old neighborhood, and his popularity is still evident. On every corner he stops to say catch up with an old friend, give a pound to someone he knows or wave at his older brother, who seems impassive at Tyrone being there. Conversations are animated with hugs, friendly tussles, and laughter. Though he travels the nation on the BMX circuit, Tyrone is still a presence in the neighborhood.

But he also had to get out of Flatbush, to be able to come back. “If it was not for riding a bike, I’d probably be on the block where I grew up, hanging out, selling drugs, getting into trouble, in jail or dead,” Rone said.

In the 1990s, when Williams was a kid, other neighborhood teens were usually playing basketball or trying to get girls. “I still see some people that are still hanging out around the corner, on the block” Rone said. And some kids did worse: they dealt drugs, toted guns, hustled in gangs.
Williams was riding, anywhere he could. There was no skate park in his neighborhood, or anywhere in Brooklyn. So he and his friends brought BMX to Flatbush. Williams built a box jump in the concrete alleyway behind his building.

He first mounted a bike when he was 5 years old, and taught himself how to ride as an escape. “I liked the idea of riding around and having so much freedom. You can go as far and wherever you want. You just ride at your own stretch in life,” says Tyrone.

Rone had no way of knowing BMX existed. But when he was 13 he borrowed a copy of Sports Illustrated for Kids and saw a picture of BMX stunt rider Dennis McCoy doing an abubaca on a sub-box—a move where the rider stalls the back wheel on the edge of an object before hopping back off. Tyrone thought to himself, “Yo, I have to do that!” Tyrone’s interest in BMX soon became an obsession.

At 14 he started messing around on his bike with greater determination, practicing tricks as much as he could. He couldn’t afford a new bike—which can cost up to $500—so he built his ride using spare parts from his friends. But most of his first bike came from the trash. While riding around with his friends if he saw a part he needed in the garbage, like a fork—the part of the bike that holds the front wheel and allows the rider to steer and balance the bicycle—he’d take it home. Today his parts are free from the companies that sponsor him.

Then he got his bike stolen at gunpoint. “I just ended up building another scrap bike,” he says with a shrug. Rone has had his bike robbed on many occasions, and the most frustrating part was to build a new machine. Putting together a bike from scrap parts doesn’t require much if you have a lot of friends willing to loan you whatever’s lying around.

In Flatbush, conflict was hard for Rone to avoid. “When I was young I would just want to fight anyone,” he remembers. His first run-in with the law came at age 15, when he was arrested on Flatbush Avenue after some acquaintances he was riding with for the first time stole a school friend’s lunch. After attempting to flee on his bike from a cop on foot, Rone wound up with a beating from a police officer and a night in jail. “It was a lesson to be learned,” he says.

On Sundays, Rone met up with a bunch of other BMX riders who’d stop off front of landmark Dutch Reform Presbyterian Church, at the crossroads of Flatbush and Church avenues. Joining him on the rides were kids from all over the city. “I didn’t even know half of them,” Rone said. But except for finding his two best friends, Wormz and Edwin, not a lot came out of those rides except getting chased by police. “Everyone would jump on cars and taxicabs and ride around the city snatching fruit from fruit stands and getting in trouble,” he remembers.
Rone quickly concluded that if he continued hanging out with troublemakers he’d be spending a lot more nights in jail. Plus, he didn’t want to piss off his mom. “When I got her mad she gave me a couple of good wooden-spoon beatings,” he says with a laugh.

He suspected BMX was his ticket out, but at the time he had no idea one could make money from being a good rider. He just wanted off the block. “I never once thought that I was gonna be one of those dudes in a magazine that kids might look at and go, ‘I wanna do that too’” he says.

His bike allowed him to venture to other parts of the city, like Coney Island and Union Square. Williams used to ride the B line to Mullaly Skate Park in the Bronx, just so he could go to the one park that didn’t charge admission. But Tyrone’s family did not support his love of riding. His mother feared that because he was asthmatic as a child, he could easily hurt himself. She especially didn’t like sitting in emergency rooms for hours nursing Tyrone’s various injuries. “You’re not tired of broken yourself?” she would scold him in her thick Jamaican accent. Tyrone reasoned with his mother and explained that he could get hurt doing anything in Flatbush more than he could riding his own bike, which he could control himself. His favorite excuse was “Yo, I can walk down the block and get shot. Do you know how many people get shot in the park playing basketball?” Because in fact, he had seen it happen.