neighborhood: bed-stuy | space type: living space | active since: 2000 | links: n/a

In a Brooklyn that gets more sanitized every day, there are still a few wild holdouts, and the Chicken Hut is one of the last men standing. “This is our reckless abandon studio,” says Greg H., who started the space with fellow woodworker JPL in the attic of what was then a working feather-processing factory. “It’s our home and the place where we’ve done every crazy fucking thing we’ve ever thought of.”

Chicken Hut bedroom [pic by Alix Piorun]

Chicken Hut founder Greg H. at Bike Kill 2014 [pic by Alix Piorun]

Filthy Savage plays a wild party [pic by Walter Wlodarczyk]

Want to learn more about the Chicken Hut, and 49 other incredible Brooklyn Spaces? Buy the book!

Environmental-activism nonprofit Time’s Up is actually one of the very first spaces I profiled when I started this project. (Read the original post here!) But that was two whole years ago, and more importantly, I just got a new (used) bike of my own from these guys, so I wanted to remind everybody how wonderful they are. They’ve also got all sorts of new initiatives and fun things in the works, so it seemed like a great time to revisit.

open workshop, pic by Eilon Paz

Time’s Up is a volunteer-run direct-action environmental group. Their most visible project is the bike co-op, which does three main things: 1) acquires, refurbishes, and sets people up with terrific, city-friendly used bikes (like mine!) for a donation of about $200; 2) leads bike repair workshops, teaching you how to fix all the different parts of your bike, including one class per week that’s for women and trans only; and 3) opens their doors three nights a week to anyone who wants to use their vast array of tools and talk to their incredibly knowledgeable mechanics while working on your own bike. (Check their calendar for dates and times.) They also hold lots of group bike rides and work on campaigns to support causes like anti-fracking, alternative energy, and safer streets, and they’re working to turn the space into a community gathering spot, with new plans like a bi-weekly movie night.

Read on for my Q&A with Keegan, one of the bottom-liners of the bike co-op and the guy who sold me my fabulous new bike!

Keegan fixing a bike, pic by me

brooklyn spaces: How would you define the Time’s Up mission?
Keegan: At heart we’re an environmental group, and because we’re in New York City, that means trying to find sustainable ways to live in an urban environment. Bike activism is a big part of it, because bicycling is sustainable transportation, and we want to make it so that everyone feels comfortable biking in the city. That means creating safe spaces, like bike lanes, but there’s always going to be a place where the bike lane ends, so we really need the streets to be safer in general. The NYPD needs to be ticketing motorists, and when cyclists and pedestrians are killed, they need to be doing proper investigations. We’re having a ride to advocate for this on March 21—everyone should come join us!

soooo many bikes! pic by me

brooklyn spaces: Where do you get the bikes you refurbish?
Keegan: We buy them in bulk, these Dutch-style Japanese bikes called mamacharis, which means “mother chariot.” They’re terrific city-friendly bikes. They’re upright, with full fenders so you can ride them in any weather, and really good brakes so they’re safe. Basically everybody rides mamacharis in Japan, they’re hugely popular. The government actually tried to ban them, because they thought it was too dangerous for women to be riding with a child on the front and a child on the back and all the groceries too. But the women of Japan rose up to defend their bicycles, and they won, the mamachari didn’t get banned.

shipment of used bikes, pix by Steve McMaster

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of the group rides you guys do.
Keegan: We have a monthly moonlight ride through Central Park and another in Prospect Park, there’s a Peace Ride that goes through various peace sites in Lower Manhattan, and we have some goofy theatrical rides, which are also direct actions, like we dress up as clowns and call ourselves the Bike Lane Liberation Front. We crash into the back of cars, like “Oh hey, what are you doing in this bike lane?” and give out fake tickets, stuff like that.

group ride, pic by Rich Johnson

brooklyn spaces: Are you guys part of Critical Mass?
Keegan: Critical Mass is leaderless and worldwide, but we used to help facilitate it in New York a lot, often just by showing up. Sadly, that ride has gotten smaller and smaller due to a massive police crackdown. It’s the same reason they shut down Occupy Wall Street: they don’t want to look like they’re allowing a political demonstration. This last month there were four riders and fourteen police vehicles! So now we do First Friday rides instead—those get forty or fifty people and zero police.

fixin’ bikes, pic by Eilon Paz

brooklyn spaces: How many people are involved in Time’s Up?
Keegan: Our volunteer base is pretty huge, we have about fifteen hundred people. It’s a big, amorphous, fun group. It’s also very much a community.

brooklyn spaces: Do people come here and say “I have a wacky bike idea, can you help?”
Keegan: Oh yeah, ever since Occupy Wall Street, when we built energy-generating bikes to offset the gas generators in Zucotti Park.

energy bikes in Zucotti Park, pic by David Shankbone

brooklyn spaces: You guys used those after Sandy too, right?
Keegan: Yeah, although the bikes that were in Zuccotti were taken by the NYPD and mostly broken. We had three up and running when Sandy hit, and we deployed them right away, on the Lower East Side. When the LES got power back we took them to the Rockaways. We were also doing group rides out there three times a week, delivering goods. Through Occupy Sandy, we got funding to build fifteen more energy bikes, and some of them are still in the Rockaways. The People’s Free Medical Clinic is using two of them instead of getting hooked back up to the grid.

energy bike in the LES, post-Sandy, pic by Margot Julia DiGregorio

brooklyn spaces: How did Time’s Up end up in Williamsburg?
Keegan: We used to be at 49 East Houston St., and we got kicked out of there when the owner sold it to a developer. We were scrounging around for space and we did a direct action in Williamsburg when the Bedford Ave bike lane was taken out, a mock funeral for the lane. We got quite a bit of press for that, and the landlord here, Baruch Herzfeld, who’s a pretty dramatic and funny bike advocate himself, really liked what we were doing. This space was actually previously a bike shop, and he let us move in and take it over.

bike forks, pic by me

brooklyn spaces: Do you feel that being in Williamsburg has had an affect on the space, the mission, the way it’s run, that sort of thing?
Keegan: Definitely. Being here dictated so much of what we did for the first couple of years, because we’re right on the borderline between Chasidic Williamsburg and hipster Williamsburg. When we opened the co-op, we had a shocking number of Chasidic people coming in to fix their bikes, both men and women. It’s really interesting to see them come here and work alongside a bunch of hipsters who obviously have very different values, and then they find out that they’re really not so different: they all want to work on their bikes, they all want to live cheaply and sustainably.

tools! pic by me

brooklyn spaces: Tell me a nice fond memory you have from your time here.
Keegan: It’s all pretty good. After every single workshop I’m like, “Wow, that was great!” I just helped this guy fix his bike who does the programming for the tiny theatre down the block, Spectacle. I also got to help a woman who had been hit by a car. It’s just so much great community building; we all become friends by the end of the night. Every workshop is a terrific experience.

***

Like this? Read more about community spaces: No-Space, Trees Not Trash, Bushwick City Farms, Brooklyn Free Store, The Illuminator, Occupy Wall Street art show, Books Through Bars

Time’s Up is an all-volunteer, nonprofit environmental advocacy group. They do about 200 themed group bike rides a year, dozens of campaigns, and close to 300 workshops annually. They have been hugely instrumental in increasing bike-riding all over New York City (including helping to start the pedicab industry), and have done great work with community gardens, greenways, reclaiming public space, animal advocacy, deforestation, fracking, and more. They’ve been written about everywhere, from the New York Times to the Indypendent, from the Brooklyn Paper to the L Magazine.

all photos by Maximus Comissar

I took my sister with me to this interview, and, embarrassingly, we didn’t bike. (In our defense, it was snowing like crazy.) But everyone was kind andwelcoming anyway, and we took a tour of the incredible space, and also got to talk to Bill, Time’s Up’s founder, and Steve, a longtime volunteer.

These days, Time’s Up is most known for its focus on biking. According to Steve, “Time’s Up is an environmental group, and biking is very environmentally sound. The mission of the group is to increase cycling to help the environment.” Among a slew of other campaigns, they participate in the mass bike movement Critical Mass, work for auto-free streets and parks, create and maintain ghost bike memorials, offer legal aid for arrested cyclists, and recently began a “Love Your Lane” campaign, designed to make cyclists feel rewarded for bicycling, rather than persecuted or harassed. Their latest action has been to build pedal-powered generators for the ongoing #OccupyWallStreet movement.

To donate to this or any of their amazing work, click the “donate” button on any page of their site. But first, check out my Q&A with Bill, Time’s Up’s founder!

brooklyn spaces: Has biking always been important to Time’s Up?
Bill: Absolutely. We’re trying to make sure biking stays solid in New York City, because we helped get it going a long time ago. We have to constantly keep the bikers strong. We focus a lot on new cyclists, with our bike rides, our campaigns, and our workshops.

brooklyn spaces: What happens at the workshops?
Bill: People learn how their bike works, what can go wrong, how to fix it, things like that. There’s a women’s bike repair class every Monday, which has been going for over six years. There’s classes about each different part of a bike. There’s thousands of dollars worth of tools here that people can experiment with. We teach cyclists skills they can use for the rest of their lives. They’re empowering themselves, making themselves independent and stronger. And it’s all good for the planet.

brooklyn spaces: What are some of your campaigns?
Bill: We have a lot of fun campaigns, like clown rides, pirate rides, sound-bikes, dancing bikes, fountain rides, where we actually go in the fountains and swim. Our next project is a “Love Your Lane” campaign, where we’ll be handing out chocolates to cyclists on the bridge, to reward people for bicycling, and to try to build community.

brooklyn spaces: Time’s Up doesn’t really do traditional demonstrations, right?
Bill: No, we mostly do positive celebrations. Instead of going somewhere and holding up signs, or standing in front of a fur store screaming, we put a plant in the ground, or fix something or recycle something. Even some of our bike rides that are designed as demonstrations, they’re saying, “This is a good thing,” not demonstrating against something.

brooklyn spaces: How has Time’s Up been affected by the move to Brooklyn?
Bill: It’s a little more difficult here, we have more security issues than we had in Manhattan. But there’s a lot of bike culture here. If you go down Bedford into Williamsburg, you have an incredible bunch of new bikers that are moving here, a kind of bike gentrification. And then if you go the other way on Bedford, you have the Chasidic neighborhood. Time’s Up is really good at growing the biking community, so instead of going to the Chasidic people and yelling, “Get out of the bike lane!”, we’re trying to get them on bikes. Chasidic kids are allowed to come here and take bikes for free, to try them out. And we’re definitely seeing more Chasidic people riding bikes, especially the men.

brooklyn spaces: Are you looking to expand Time’s Up into even more spaces?
Bill: Oh yeah, if we can get more spaces, we’ll have more great activities. One of the hardest things has always been finding space. And we always get spaces without heat, without air conditioning, and everyone is freezing. It takes years to get a space set up using all volunteer work, and then we have to move, because every time we fix up a place and make it cool, the first one to go is us. We usually only can afford to stay in a space for two or three years, so we’re always looking. But whenever we have a space, you can really see the city changing. When we were in the LES we saw more biking in the LES; when we moved to Williamsburg we saw more biking in Williamsburg. Of course we went there because it was friendly to biking, but I think we really helped encourage the movement.

brooklyn spaces: How does someone get involved with Time’s Up?
Bill: Come to the Brooklyn space on any of the days we’re open—Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday—and then just keep showing up. We operate a lot of people in a small space, and we’re all over each other. But people like to work together, it builds community. And you can cross-flow the volunteers. Some volunteers will come here to do paperwork, and then they’ll realize, “Well maybe I’d like to fix a bike.” Or some of the mechanics are like, “I could do some graphics for that flier.” That’s really all we need: the space and the volunteers. Once you have a space, people volunteer, and then magic can happen.

***

Like this? Read more about community spaces: Body Actualized Center, No-Space, Trinity Project, Trees Not Trash, Bushwick City Farms, Brooklyn Free Store

I actually love Time’s Up so much, I went back to interview them again two years later. That one is here.