The ‘Hood and the New Seat

As I mentioned in this post from last week, some jackass helped himself (or herself) to my bike seat from the locked bike room in my building. This morning, I walked my bike through Bloor West Village to Brown’s Cycle to get a new seat.

Bloor West Village

Bloor West Village is the stretch of Bloor Street West — one of the main east-west streets of Accordion City, along which one of our subway lines runs — bounded roughly by Runnymede on the east side and Jane Street on the West side. It’s lined with cafes, restaurants, groceries, bakeries, book shops and other yuppie-centric stores. As a single guy in my twenties and early thirties, Queen Street West was more my scene, but as a married man who’s much closer to 40 than 30, I rather like the vibe of this family and dog-friendly neighbourhood and being right next door to one of the largest parks in the city while remaining a bikeable distance (or a short subway ride, or a near-blip of a car trip) from downtown.

Even Vice magazine, whose target audience is club-going urban teens and twenty-somethings and whose staff are aggressively hipster, has trouble faulting the neighbourhood in their Toronto ‘Hood Guide:

[The Bloor West Village / High Park neighbourhood] is a kind of urban utopia for the middle-upper class. You are basically living downtown but you have a mini-Muskoka in High Park. The houses are old and have style and it’s really safe and community-oriented. It’s also expensive. If you hate the leisure classes and their children, stay away. If you hate trees and fresh air, you are not logical.

Personally, I think it’s a strange conceit for a magazine whose image is that their staff don’t wake up/stop coming down until noon on Monday and don’t have kids, a mortgage or a job that requires much in the way of responsibility or even showing up on time to refer to other people as “the lesiure class”, but the rest of the description is right-on.

Living just east of the stretch of shops and working farther east, I don’t get much of a chance to see Bloor West Village during the day on weekdays, which is a shame. It’s a lively neighbourhood with a mix of activites and people, the sort of place that Jane Jacobs praised in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It was a bit of a treat walking through the ‘hood this morning, even if I had to circumnavigate the bike around a number of strollers, walkers and dogs. I even got a “Hey! You’re the Accordion Guy!” from a high-schooler, even though I haven’t yet busked in this neck of the woods. I just wish I’d brought my camera with me this morning.

Introducing: Suspension!

The guy at Brown’s Cycle took a measurement to figure out what size seat post I needed and asked me if I wanted a suspension post.

“Suspension post? You mean they make seat posts with suspensions?” I asked. Clearly I haven’t been paying attention to bike technology.

He took me to a row of suspension seat posts, which are essentially seat posts with a shock absorber built into them. They weren’t terribly expensive, so I added it to a nice cushiony seat that matched my Trek Calpyso cruiser, and the ride is incredible. Riding on my bike is now like having your bum carried aloft by angels. I highly recommend it.