“We have this incredible opportunity in cities for the bicycle to be a realistic and practical form of transportation—fast, easy, convenient, fun,” says 34-year-old Ezra Caldwell, whose custom bike-building business, Fast Boy Cycles, in New York City, offers both a joyful ride and a thing of beauty.

“These are bikes you have to have a relationship with,” Caldwell says of his soulful single-speeds. “Pure, simple and clean” is the operative aesthetic of the bikes, with features he handcrafts in materials meant “to improve with age”—wood handlebars and fenders, leather saddles, patinaed metal frames. “What I’m making has a classic appeal, yet these are not low-tech bikes. They are performance bikes.”

Working alone in a small shop in a Harlem brownstone, Caldwell explains that “from conception to completion, each bike is thought out to the detail—what it’s for, how it should look—and built to be precisely that.” His clients include people like the London-based equity manager who first admired a Fast Boy bike on a Manhattan street and promptly ordered one for his office commute. “He can afford a driver,” says Caldwell, “but he sits at a computer all day, crunching numbers. At the end of that day, he wants a real experience.”

Caldwell’s own path has been circuitous, very much about the journey. Growing up in Vermont, where “everyone and his father is in construction” (his own dad is a wood furniture craftsman), he worked summers on building crews, absorbing “a hands-on, practical sensibility about making stuff.” At 18 he spent six months in a refugee resettlement camp in El Salvador, teaching war-wounded combatants to make tourist items in a makeshift jungle wood shop. Back then
he thought art should be about “service,” not “self-exploration, navel gazing and arty-farty bollocks.” At the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, he dabbled in industrial design and crafts, then–always ath­letically coordinated—impulsively switched his major to dance. Moving to New York in 1999, he made his name as a dancer, teacher and choreographer of “wildly avant-garde” performances before quitting last summer to turn his life-long love of bikes into a full-time business.

“I’ve done quite a flip over the years,” says Caldwell. “When I was dancing, I realized the value of fine art, of art for art’s sake. I lost the hardcore edge of art must be useful.” Now he has the best of both worlds: “As an artist, I’m making the most elegant and useful machine there is.”

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