Manifest celebration of community: Alleycat bicycle riders race through Bloomington

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A dozen bicycles were laid out on the grass at Bryan Park. Several yards away, their riders were lined up. waiting for the starting whistle.

When it blew, they headed for their machines.

Some sprinted, mounted up, and pedalled away. Others took a more thoughtful approach, poring over a printed manifest as they walked to their bicycles.

Just before the start of the race, riders had received the manifest, which was a list of checkpoints they had to visit, in any order, to complete the race.

That’s how the scramble-style start unfolded for the Bloomington Homes for All alleycat bicycle race on Saturday afternoon (Aug. 15).

The race format, with its manifest of checkpoints, which makes it a scavenger hunt of sorts, is the hallmark of alleycat-style bicycle racing. The final checkpoint, where the race concluded, was Friendly Beasts Cider Company.

Saturday’s checkpoints were hosted by local organizations which had defined some small task for riders to complete before they could move on.

To follow some of the action, The B Square pedaled west from Bryan Park to the B-Line, then north to 7th Street and the Bloomington Bike Project, from there south again to Grimes Lane, then farther west to Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard, and from there down to the Switchyard Park skatepark where “We’re Crankie!” was set up.

At the Bike Project, which is sponsored by the Center for Sustainable Living, volunteers Chris and Lexona, were staffing the alleycat checkpoint. They volunteer at the Bike Project—as does Saturday’s race director, Seaforth.

The checkpoint assignment served a practical purpose for the Bike Project, which takes donated bicycles and parts and rehabs them into good, rideable shape. Alleycat racers had to remove tires from rims, which needed to be separated anyway.

For a few minutes, racers who had just been pedaling like mad through town were bent over bicycle wheels, getting their hands dirty with an ordinary piece of shop work, before climbing back onto their bikes.

Staffing the Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard check point were Lou and Sam. The Hub was not hard to bring on board for the alleycat—race director Seaforth also volunteers there.

Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard offered a different set of challenges. One option involved throwing potatoes at stacked cans in a carnival-style game, then shoving a shopping cart loaded with recyclable containers into a stack of milk crates. The other option was quicker, but looked fairly disgusting: Take a bite out of a kombucha SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), one of the rubbery discs grown in Mother Hubbard’s kitchen. Still, it was described by one alleycat rider like this: “It’s not bad—it’s just the texture is a little weird.”

At the Switchyard skatepark, the checkpoint was staffed by Elizabeth, with a project she founded locally, inspired by an experience in Minneapolis, called “We’re Crankie!” The task she had set for alleycat racers was contributing a drawing to a scroll, which would later be viewed in a hand-cranked storytelling device, that wound between two spools.

Elizabeth said a scroll she made at Lotus Festival last year stretched 103 feet. On Saturday, the artistic efforts of riders were impacted by the heat of the day combined with their physical effort. As Elizabeth put it: “There’s been a lot of sweat!” While The B Square was at the checkpoint, an alleycat rider took their time to render a big pink heart with multi-colored arrows radiating outward in every direction like a sunburst in purple, blue, teal, orange and pink.

Those were just three stops on a manifest that included several Bloomington organizations, gathering places and community projects. Other checkpoints included: Bike Party at the Willie Streeter Community Gardens and the Community Orchard; Bike Polo at Building Trades Park; an Avalon Land Trust property; Middle Earth at Bloomington Cooperative Living; a Queer Sports League stop at Reverend Butler Park; Harmony School; and a Traveling University table at the south end of Switchyard Park.

Traveling University was established by retired university faculty as a response to increasing restrictions on what and how university faculty are allowed to teach in Indiana.

Traveling University turned its alleycat checkpoint into a kind of academic trading-card game. Riders were given a stack of five identical cards featuring a professor and their subject for an upcoming series of talks. As part of the task, as riders encountered other racers who had visited the checkpoint, they had to trade for cards until they had a complete set of the five different upcoming talks.

On arrival at the Friendly Beast final stop, none of the riders had a complete set of Traveling University playing cards. Each new arrival was instantly swarmed by riders already at the finish, cards in hand, calling out which one they needed and what they had to trade.

Late into the evening, there was still uncertainty over whether a fifth distinct card actually existed. It did.

By then, the post-race venue had become a pure social gathering. Riders compared routes, talked about which checkpoints they had skipped or saved for last and swapped stories from past alleycats. Bikes leaned against walls and railings while people waited for the results.

Entrants were free to compete under a nom de vélo instead of a legal name. So the first four finishers were: Dank Hunkum, Showboat, Merc, and Barnacle Bob (aka Ant).

The backdrop to the event was a grassroots effort to preserve the block of buildings, known as Seminary Pointe, which includes the current location of Friendly Beasts. It was billed as a fundraiser for the effort to “Save Seminary Pointe,” where the buildings are likely soon to be demolished. It’s part of a plan generally related to Bloomington’s convention center expansion and specifically connected to a privately developed hotel.

A protest is planned for next Wednesday’s (Aug. 19) meeting of the Monroe County capital improvement board, which is overseeing the convention center expansion.

But that cause stayed mostly in the background until the concluding remarks from the race director.

Seaforth said, “We’ve been fighting to try to save Seminary Pointe.” He continued, “In addition to that, our long-term campaign is to work on affordable housing in this community going forward. Because we want Bloomington to be affordable now in the places where it is already affordable, where it is already functioning.” He added, “It just needs to be preserved and retained in community control, and we want it to be affordable forever.”

The somewhat grim political prospects for Seminary Pointe did not dampen the mood for Saturday’s race. With temperatures in the low 80s but humidity near 100%, the afternoon was a rolling, sweaty celebration of Bloomington’s community.

Photos: Bloomington Homes for All alleycat bicycle race

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