Building Frames, Building A Community

A Frame builder and Bike Shop Owner Forges His Own Path in a Changing Neighborhood.

- Brendan Leonard

Gregory Crichlow builds custom steel bikes in the back of Chocolate Spokes Bike Studio in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood—clean, subtle frames, with no name on the down tube, just a head badge with a cacao bean and a bike wheel. Dozens of customers have bought and loved the frames he’s welded for them. So you might wonder why he rides a beat-up old Surly to work every day.

He used to have his own Chocolate Spokes bike, blue and black, and he used to put it up in the window of the shop every day when he opened in the morning, sort of a sign that he was there for the day. He opened the shop in August 2011 in a humble 375-square-foot space on 28th and Downing Streets, right next to a liquor store. Transient folks would pee on the outside of the building, the dealers and customers exchanging crack cocaine and cash dubbed the electrical box in front of the shop “the drop box.”

The shop was crowded with customers’ bikes awaiting pick-up, other bikes awaiting maintenance and repair, and a few consignment bikes Gregory sold. So the front window was actually a good spot to store the bike, off the tiny shop’s floor and out of the way. But one day in January 2013, Gregory was talking to two customers, and turned around to see that his bike had disappeared from the window. Gone.

“You know what’s sad,” he said to me in the shop later that week, “is I know someone got $30 for that bike, because they just needed some money. This is still a crack corner.” He was angry at first, and called his wife, Cher—who reminded him that he was one of very few people who could just build themselves another bike.