Streetscape: Mark Jacobson

Charging Ahead Baruch Herzfeld wants to end the rash of e-bike battery fires.

WHEN WE MET, Baruch Herzfeld admitted to a degree of nerves about his newest brainchild, PopWheels. It wasn't that the usually unflappable, relentlessly upbeat Herzfeld lacked confidence in the product. That product, an outdoor recharging cabinet that will enable the city's 75,000 or so e-bike-riding deliveristas to trade a spent lithium-ion battery safely for a recharged one, was great. Rigorously tested and retested, it was totally solid. Rather, it was the transitory moment at hand that disquieted the Brooklyn entrepreneur, the passage from one stage of existence to another, like attending your bar mitzvah all over again at age 52.

For the past three decades, since his graduation from Yeshiva University in 1994, Herzfeld had been content to play the role of the winking gadfly, a yiddishe Merry Prankster. A compulsive impresario, he'd started several businesses, many operating in that gray area between the letter of The Law and the lightly litigated zone of anything goes. Mostly catering to recent immigrants and the otherwise migratory, some of these ventures, like a long-running international phone card used by transplants to call home, made good money. Others, like his "indoor trailer park," for which he placed battered RVs purchased on Craigslist inside a cavernous Bushwick warehouse and rented them out to crust punks, were closer to performance art.