The latest episode in our “A Ward Tour” video series focuses on Ward 13. The name for “A Ward Tour,” as you may have guessed if you love 1990s hip hop, is an homage to the song “Award Tour” from A Tribe Called Quest’s 1993 album “Midnight Marauders.” I’ll be watching as A Tribe Called Quest is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this Saturday.
Tell me a little about yourself and your business.
Hi. My name is Berto Huertas. I’m the owner of Six City Cycles. We’re in Old Brooklyn and we’re part of Ward 13.
So Sixth City Cycles has been in business for about five years now. Primarily it’s a bicycle repair shop. We sell bicycles, we sell accessories and parts. And now we’ve also stepped into selling indoor houseplants as a way to bring some income during the winter.
What’s your favorite thing about this area?
My favorite things about old Brooklyn that I love is the bike-ability of it. You can get to anywhere you need to go very easily. Just being able to go from my workplace and then just get on my bicycle and explore a lot of different cuisines in the neighborhood alone. So I love being able to just jump on my bike and go down the street and have literally six options within a five-minute bike ride down the street. I usually am in here pretty early in the morning, and just being able to grab some delicious breakfast right up the street and then bring it here, scarf it down and get ready to service bikes or whatever it may be is a great thing to have.
I feel like Old Brooklyn’s got a lot going for it. We’re kind of in this main drag of Pearl Road, and Pearl Road has a lot of stuff to offer. So we have grooming places, we have restaurants, we have coffee shops, we have businesses that have been around for 50 years. You’ve got all these fun bike lanes that kind of branch off into different sections of the neighborhoods. You’ve got old greenhouses that are still trying to get back into operation. So there’s a lot of stuff happening in this chunk of the ward that is really exciting to see. Just kind of bringing a little bit of the old and the new, and it’s mixing it up to just really provide a fun experience for anybody who lives here or who comes and visits.
What are the biggest challenges this ward faces?
I think the biggest challenge that this ward in particular faces is that there’s a lot of things that have been around for a long time, which are great. But there’s a slight lack of community when it comes to the businesses. We need to work towards just helping each other and not be scared of change. I think this neighborhood in particular has this fear that they’re going to get turned into this like hipster, trendy, gentrified neighborhood, which is a legitimate concern. But, also, if you do it the right way and organically and you help each other out, it can really thrive. And I feel like this ward struggles at times to really cope with that. They need to understand it like, ‘We’re all in it together.’
Where have you found community?
I found a lot of community. In the events that are put on, I see a lot of community with the residents. A lot of the residents come out and support in masses. The neighborhood really comes out and, like, rallies around it and brings people that might not be in the neighborhood. We see them at these events. They come out of their way to not only support but just kind of bring people who might not live in the neighborhood. They bring them in and they make sure that they make it to these events.
Why did you choose Old Brooklyn for your business?
The reason we planted ourselves in Old Brooklyn, in particular, was because it was almost a dormant neighborhood in terms of businesses. There wasn’t a lot going on. So realistically, it was cheaper entry into being able to open up a business because of the rent. But that also gave us the opportunity to kind of be the one stop shop for bicycles. There was no bicycle repair shops in the area. So this was a perfect location because there’s a lot of stuff bicycle-related nearby, whether it be the MetroParks trails, whether it be just the bikeability of this whole strip of the main roads, Broadview and Pearl, and it just kind of seemed weird that this major stretch and this big neighborhood didn’t have a bicycle shop.
I see the neighborhood progressing and growing and just the storefronts cleaning up around their immediate area. You see a lot of business owners out there cleaning and doing fresh paint jobs. You see a lot of old, decrepit businesses that have sat stagnant with boarded up windows for a long time now. That plywood is gone and they might have installed new windows in there and new curtains or gave it a fresh makeover or whatever it is. And it’s exciting to see because we’ve been in the neighborhood now going on six years, and in that small amount of time, we’ve seen a big turnaround of, like, this weird ghost town that not a lot of things happened after 5:00 to now you see a lot of stuff happening.
