SOMERVILLE — Ethan Moore was wearing a nice sweater the first time he set foot in Somerville Bike Kitchen last year, the kind of threads usually worn to impress a date — not for dealing with the grease and gears of a bicycle.
But such was Moore’s dilemma.
He was due to meet up with his partner, Julie Beaulieu, for a home cooked meal but needed to realign the front wheel of his bicycle to get to her apartment safely. After adjusting the tension of his spokes, Moore’s wheel was true, but his sense of time wasn’t.
“He was late for dinner,” said Beaulieu.
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Ten months later and, despite Moore’s tardiness that April night, he and Beaulieu are still going strong. So is Moore’s affinity for Somerville Bike Kitchen.
The bike repair co-operative, also known as SBK, is a place where anyone can fix their own bike with optional guidance from volunteers. Patrons use shop tools to make repairs and pay what they can upon completion. But perhaps more importantly, they build a sense of community around a shared passion by helping each other out.
On a recent February evening, the couple was side-by-side at the bike kitchen off of Somerville Avenue — Moore fixing the brakes on his spare bike and Beaulieu replacing the handlebar tape on a bike she and Moore built together.
“It’s nice to have a place where we can do it ourselves and not have to pay an absurd amount of money,” said Beaulieu. “I had no idea how to fix anything on my bike before I started doing this… but now I’ve learned so much.”
According to the City of Somerville, an average of 302 bikers were passing major intersections at high traffic times in 2023, the highest measurement since the data started being collected annually in 2010. As biking grows as a primary form of transport, so does the need for upkeep.
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SBK, which is open every Tuesday and Thursday night, is helmed by a rotating cast of 10 staff members, and many other volunteers. They are instructed to offer verbal assistance, but avoid touching patrons’ bikes because “it takes away from other people’s learning opportunities,” according to staff member Ace Young.
“It’s not a bike shop. It’s not somewhere you can just drop your bike off and expect it to get fixed at a later time and exchange money for that service,” said Young.
Though bike co-ops like SBK have a different model than traditional bike shops, Luis Fernandez, a SBK staff member emeritus, said “the kitchen tries very hard not to compete” given that bike shop profit margins are often slim. Instead, Fernandez said, their goal is to offer cyclists independence from relying on someone else for repairs they can complete themselves by removing financial barriers and providing proper tools and expertise.
But SBK does more than just provide space for do-it-yourself tinkering. It’s also a meeting location for underrepresented groups within the bike community. Femmechanics, a group of femme, transgender, women, and non-binary people, periodically meets at the co-operative.
Andrea Aparicio, a member of both SBK and Femmechanics, said the kitchen “has been wonderful” about providing “a safe space to ask questions, to learn, to get together, and also to form a community.”
The value of having a physical space to form these bonds is not lost on the cooperative, given its humble origins. The bike kitchen was started in 2015 as an arm of the Somerville-based youth education nonprofit Powderhouse. SBK operated out of a mostly residential area near Davis Square rent-free for more than seven years, footing operational costs through donations.
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But in 2022, Powderhouse informed SBK staff that it was expanding its programming, and needed the garage space back. SBK had less than a year to set up shop elsewhere.
“We had a decision: Either we just stop doing this, we close down, or we have to put in a significant effort to find a new home,” said Fernandez, one of the cooperative’s first volunteers. They chose the latter, but since SBK couldn’t afford to pay market-price for commercial real estate in Somerville, they had to get creative.
The bike kitchen created petitions, appealed to Somerville officials, and spread the word about its search for a new home on social media.
Their organizing paid off. In August, Somernova, a Somerville business park, offered SBK the opportunity to share space with the Dojo, Somernova’s youth center.
“Without [Somernova and the Dojo], the bike kitchen would not exist,” Fernandez said.
According to Galen Mook — executive director of the statewide bicycle advocacy group MassBike and himself a co-founder of the bike co-op CommonWheels in Allston — finding affordable space is an existential challenge for most bike kitchens in the area.
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“We do not have a lot of cheap, open space anymore because of the [real estate] market,” said Mook. Many bike co-ops, he said, operate “in the gaps where development has yet to really take hold.”
This economic barrier has not stopped SBK from inspiring the creation of bike co-ops in other communities around Greater Boston, especially those with few shops. The Dorchester Bike Kitchen was founded in-part by a former SBK staff member in 2021, through a grassroots effort, while the decades-old bike safety nonprofit Bike to the Sea is bringing a co-op to Malden.
Jonah Chiarenza, executive director of Bike to the Sea, said his organization reached out to SBK for guidance on how to run a bike kitchen, because “they’ve just been a paragon for facilitating that kind of DIY” community service.
“It’s just a fun place to be,” Chiarenza added.
Moore, the bike kitchen patron who risked a sweater to fix his ride, agrees.
“Someone said to me once, ‘You don’t own something until you know how to fix it.’ I love tinkering and messing around with stuff,” he said. “I find the community of that here with other people who love working on bikes.”
Julian E.J. Sorapuru is a Development Fellow at the Globe and can be reached at julian.sorapuru@globe.com. Follow him @JulianSorapuru