David Pyle is a public school teacher who lives in Pilsen, works on the west side, and has biked all over town for years without a problem. Until last Wednesday, when his bike was snatched from a heavily policed corner of Columbus Drive, apparently by the city.
About three hours later he returned to find that his bicycle–a Fuji mountain bike–was gone. “It had vanished,” he says, “along with the lock.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
By then almost an hour had passed since the end of the concert, and they were getting conflicting pieces of information. “At one point someone told us that the locks had been cut and the bikes turned over to their owners,” says Schoonover. “I said, ‘That’s impossible. We are the owners–and we don’t have our bikes!’ I’m thinking, ‘This is crazy. Were they just unlocking the bikes and giving them to whoever claimed them?’”
One person who saw what happened to some of the bikes is Paul Wertheimer, a crowd-management consultant who runs a Web site called www.crowdsafe.com. “I still can’t get over it,” he says. “I was walking on Columbus near Balbo, and all of a sudden this yellow Streets and Sanitation truck comes up and two guys get out. One of them has this four-foot lock cutter. They went up to the bikes that were locked to the barricades and cut the locks off. It was just snip, and off went the locks. So much for protection. These were nice bikes too. Some of them could have cost 1,000 bucks. They just threw the bikes into the back of the truck like it was no big deal.
How are people generally supposed to get bikes that have been towed away by Streets and Sanitation work crews?
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Dorothy Perry.
