Last night I found myself in the basement of Time's Up, drinking beer and wrenching on bikes a little bit, but mostly hanging out with some other bikers that I know.

The basement is crowded, packed with bikes, parts, and oddities. A bench that looks like it was once a pew is on one wall underneath a dozens of used and worn tires hanging from a rail; on the bench is a large hollow "subway" sign. One end of the room is taken up with bikes, lined up perpindicular to the wall, with many more hanging above. The room has more corners than I first noticed, where odd things are piled and stacked out of the way beneath more hanging bikes. There are a dozen bike forks on the wall, a large tool box, a mildly inexplicable ramp that rises 3" high to part of the cracked concrete floor, and a creaky stairway that rises to a bathroom that's little more than a closet.

While peeing I noticed that two of the bathroom walls were crumbling brick, like an unfinished exterior, which held a backalley magic that jumped out at me for moment, and for that moment I felt very happy. Pleased that there are still old, disreputable corners in New York City - quiet, mysterious pockets set back from the bustle. It seems to me that spending so much time on the crowded sidewalks or the avenues that penetrate the city with the imposition of the incessant automobile makes me forget that there are these out of the way moments that retain the beauty of the unfinished, the unseen, the worn, the entropic.

I don't intend to resort to the cliche of The Fast-Paced Life In The City That Never Sleeps, because it's not about the pace of life in the Big Apple. It's about the spaces that are given over to multiple lane monstrosities as places to wander around on foot shrink and shrink and shrink until you have to be peeing in a bicycle community center to find some small moment of hidden treasure.