It’s a crisp mid-September Tuesday night and several dozen bikers are dawdling in front of the art museum steps. As many as 60 people will trickle to the steps before 11:55 p.m., at which point an undesignated leader will signal that it’s time to cruise. And off the informal troops will go, peddling through the thick knot of Philadelphia that separates them from their destination — cheap, salty and condiment-dipped pretzels. This is the pretzel ride, and just like every Tuesday at midnight, it’s about to take off.
“This is my fourth time doing it,” says Alfred, a stocky Drexel student. Alfred leans against his fixed-gear bike and bobs his Afro with nonchalant gestures. “Yeah, I just came from some heavy drinking at a bar. But I’ve been coming back here every week because it’s fun.”
It’s a simple excuse — doing something because it’s fun — but one corroborated by most bikers in attendance. Occasionally watching for midnight on the large clock flashing across the PECO building’s LED display, the waiting bikers chat and play games. One game, called Foot Down, pits fixed gear bikers against each other in an attempt to throw the others off balance, causing them to put a foot down on the ground. Cheers and jeers roll through huddles of “fixies” as pierced and tattooed participants show off just how much control they have over their two wheels.
Suddenly, a pack of 10 riders starts to make its way from the steps to the road. Everyone looks up, a calm excitement swoops across the collective mass, and people grab their handlebars. A motley peloton of Philadelphians soon clog the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
Cruising toward City Hall, the group loses density. A pack of bikers, out to win the first pretzel or prove how fast they are, speed ahead. These are the bikers with stronger quadriceps than most, the fancy cyclists using their multi-thousand dollar vehicles in multi-thousand dollar ways, and the drunk enthusiasts who can’t quite feel just how breathless they are. Behind them is a larger pack — peddling at a good clip but just slow enough so they can maintain their conversations. And then, as always, a dispersed group of stragglers bring up the rear on mountain bikes, cruisers and wobbly legs.
The pretzel riders zip around City Hall, launching themselves south onto Broad Street. Turning left at Washington Avenue, they pump past the Italian Market and through the pungent odors of garbage and seafood restaurants. Finally, hitting 8th Street, the spokes stop spinning and mouths begin to salivate. A line forms in front of the Center City Pretzel Company and people tap their toes in anticipation of biting into the warm, first-batch-of-the-night pretzels.
Before long, there are pretzels in the air. Dionisi Daoularis, blond and wearing a sticky T-shirt, is using an aerial distribution method to share a box full of 50 pretzels with his friends. He flings one at a time, letting the 25-cent pieces of dough smack into people’s hands like salty high-fives. Soon, everyone around him looks content with bulging cheeks.
Some traditions are birthed in obscurity, and to a certain degree, the pretzel ride falls into that category. But if one were to look for the ride’s origins, a discussion thread on www.bikeforums.net would be a good starting point. Deep in the belly of the forum resides a conversation initiated by “the_shogster,” titled “Philly Pretzel Fix?” The_shogster, who begins the conversation on the morning of December 2, 2004, calls out to the masses:
Hey philly riders... how about a late night/early morning ride to the pretzel factory on washington? nocoins... maybe we can do it on a tuesday so you can come? lemme know what ya'll think.
Five days and several dozen posts on the thread later, the first ever Pretzel Ride became a reality.
The_shogster’s identity is Laura Csira, then a Temple student from Doylestown. Laura (who has since married and changed her last name to Niedziocha) was a worker at Trophy Bikes on Walnut Street and an occasional racer on the store’s mountain bike team. Though she has since moved outside of Philadelphia and runs a health and wellness center in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Laura can still vividly recall her motivations for beginning the ride.
“There was a ride going on Thursday nights — Thrashing Thursdays. It was a really fast ride to go around the city in a big loop, and I thought it would be fun to start a ride with a purpose.” That purpose was pretzels, and as Laura explains, “I would never turn down a pretzel.”
Laura rode the first ride along with her friends Kevin Nocoins, Dan Niedziocha (her eventual husband) and just a few others. Laura remembers the first rides as being low-key but accentuated by a creative variety of condiments like salsa, chocolate syrup, cheeses and ice cream. One night, some of the riders began spreading the chocolate syrup in the road and held a skidding contest.
Laura regularly attended the rides — originally called Twisted Tuesdays — for about a year before she got too busy with her exercise physiology classes and an internship. But by then, the rides had a life of their own with as many as 70 people showing up weekly. What had started as an intimate gathering of friends had turned into a crowded mixing pot of different groups and anonymous strangers.
Laura hasn’t actually done the ride in about three years, but she believes “it's really awesome that it’s still going on. I feel totally proud. It's my little gift to the Philadelphia community.”
When asked whether she intends to come back for the ride any time soon, Laura explains that she needs, “to be at work at 6 a.m. on Wednesdays.” She pauses, and then says, “But maybe I’ll take a day off sometime and do it.” There is something warm and nostalgic in her tone as she utters those words, and it becomes evident that once a pretzel rider, always a pretzel rider.
It’s 4:30 a.m. on a Monday morning and the Center City Pretzel Company is doing business. A man named John, whose spiky hair and sweatpants are the same shade of gray, stands behind the front counter taking orders. 500 for $125? No problem.
Without the riders, the Pretzel Company feels empty, but only on the outside. Inside, it’s a veritable production factory. First, the pretzels are mixed in an industrial-sized vat. The wheat dough is then run through a stamping machine that gives the pretzels their rectangular, figure-eight shape (the Company only makes the classic, hand-twisted pretzels for a select few customers). After the dough rises in a cooler, it trudges onto a conveyor belt where it is coated in a browning solution and salt before baking for about 12 minutes. When the pretzels emerge from the oven, a worker packs the soft, steaming morsels into cardboard boxes.
John Bialoszewski, owner and manager, says that depending on the night, the factory usually produces tens of thousands of pretzels for about 300 vendors across the Metro Philadelphia region. The pretzel ride only constitutes about 1 percent of their Tuesday night sales. Still, he considers the riders to be some of his favorite customers. “They’re surprisingly polite and dependable,” he says gleaming. “It amazes me that so many kids keep on coming out so late at night for so long. They’re great.”
The Pretzel Ride’s growth is a reflection of biking culture in Philadelphia. According to the 2008 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Philadelphia has more bicycle commuters per capita than any other major city. The Bicycle Coalition of Philadelphia reports that over the past three years, the number of bicyclists has doubled in the city. Additionally, Mayor Michael Nutter has created two new bike lanes in Center City, bicycle shops are thriving, and in September, Philly’s first Naked Bike Ride was popularly attended and happily received by hundreds.
But all is not well in this pedaling city. As reported in local media, bicyclists are both literally and metaphorically clashing with other urban travelers — namely pedestrians and cars. The lament of drivers and walkers can be sensed in media reports that stir anti-biking commentary and on the streets themselves, where angry Philadelphians voice complaints about bikers who lack respect for safety, laws and common etiquette. Accounts of bikers who run red lights, jump onto sidewalks without warning, and ride against the flow of traffic are enough to doubt whether Philadelphia really wants to encourage this mode of transport.
Indeed, the Pretzel Ride now exists in an atmosphere that sometimes encourages territorialism. Pretzel Riders regularly cruise through red lights, dominate as many lanes of the road as possible, and nod happily when cars come to abrupt halts at biker-clogged intersections.
Jenn Sunday, one of the original Pretzel Riders, recalls how, “it was nice to establish ourselves on the road at night, whereas cabs ruled the street [during the day]. It was very liberating to roam the streets then.” Sunday, however, concedes that such an attitude resulted in a sense of false security. During her time in Philadelphia (she has since moved to Portland) Sunday remembers several pretzel riders getting into accidents once they were without the strength of numbers.
Andrew Mearns, a 21-year-old film student at UArts, provides an example of how even non-aggressive riders may be twisting the pretzel ride in dangerous directions. Blond-haired and smiling, Mearns looks sheepish as he explains how he hit a taxi during a recent ride.
“We were all flying down Broad Street, and we had a red light crossing Pine, and a cab came shooting out of nowhere. He was speeding, but it was our wrong to run the red light. And I couldn’t stop in time and I braced for it — I was ready.” Mearns pauses for dramatic effect and then continues. “And I jumped off my bike right as I hit, rolled over the hood and landed on the ground on the other side of the car.”
Mearns, as it turns out, was okay. His bike’s front tire was slightly misaligned, but he and the three other people who were running the red light and hit the cab were unharmed. While it is fortunate that no serious accidents are known to have occurred during a pretzel ride, there seems to be a justified amount of concern that someone like Mearns won’t make it all the way to the factory.
Laura, meanwhile, takes a more pragmatic stance on the issue. “I'm not saying you have to stop at every stoplight or stop sign. No one really does that. But it’s important that riders be safe and don't piss off drivers. Whether we like it or not, they're not going anywhere. If you piss off a driver and make them angry, they'll take it out on the next biker.”
In an informal survey, riders appear to be evenly split between valuing the ride, the pretzel and social scene. None of these motivations dominate attendance.
Scantily dressed for the cold October night, Dave McNulty is trying to decide why he does the ride. “I dunno, but the community can act in just such a sweet and harmonic way.” McNulty sits on a BMX bike with one shoe on and the other wrapped around the axle of his back tire in a strange knot of shoelace and metal. He had a technical malfunction on the way to the factory he explains, quickly reassuring anybody who is listening that, “I’m just breathing vodka right now.” And indeed, he is.
His friend, Jeff Greene, nods in agreement. “Yeah, totally. Before I blew my lungs out, it was for the race. Now it’s for the fun.” Greene is holding a skateboard with an image of Albert Einstein and a pro-healthcare reform sticker on the bottom. Despite riding without a bike, Greene was among the first to arrive at the factory. “We were just sitting around and decided to do the ride tonight. We’ve done it a million times, but we didn’t have our normal bikes, so we just grabbed what we could find and made it happen.”
All around Dave and Jeff, various Philadelphians are munching on pretzels, enjoying the company of friends and strangers, and passing around brown bags of beer and 40’s. No one is posing, the hooligans are peaceful, and the factory’s door keeps opening into a grin. Dave looks up with a gregarious smile. “Do you know the word swicked? I just made it up. It’s sweet and wicked. That’s the Pretzel Ride — really swicked.” The two laugh at themselves, finish their pretzels, and then roll off into the night.
