Allan Appel Photo
Travers with a bike rack good enough to eat.
Pulling up on his Specialized Allez bike, Ben Green faced a big decision: Tie up to the stylish squash? The inviting carrots? Or the happy broccoli?
The Yale rising senior, a squash man at heart, is the “super intern” in the office of city traffic tsar Jim Travers.
In less than ten months he has spearheaded (broccoli-like) the creation and fabrication of the newest piece of public art in town. It’s useful art: a new mixed-vegetable bike rack installed this week in front of Claire’s Corner Copia vegetarian restaurant.
Travers’ department plans to install three or four more similar artistic racks around town to tell the bicycling community, if they didn’t know it already: “You’re wanted! You’re respected! You’re artistic!”
Claire’s owner Claire Criscuolo donated $600 for the rack. Yale threw in the steel tubing; a $1,200 mayor’s community arts grant went toward a pipe bender. The artistic and design hours came from the Design for American Workshop at Yale and from the Creative Arts Workshop.
Whimsy & Utility In Balance
Noted sculptor and CAW teacher Ann Lehman and her crew did the design and fabrication. The project fuses utility with whimsy.
Green and some Yale colleagues floated the art-bike rack idea 10 months ago. Travers responded: Find the money. Find a merchant willing to have it outside the front door. We’ll install it.
Criscuolo responded to a flyer; she told Green she’d been telling aldermen who to her restaurant that she wants a bike rack out front, but one with more whimsy that the standard-issue city version.
Over the next months, Green served as the young impresario of a project that had to balance lead designer Ann Lehman’s artistic inclination with utility. Click here for a story showing her working on the initial mock-up.
“She wanted it to be beautiful. I was concerned it had to be functional,” Green said as he pointed to the cute green sprouts sticking out of the carrot to show some true vegetable detail.
The crossing of the carrots also had to be low enough for a bike to fit across them. With one on the carrot, another bike on the squash, and one on either side of the frilly broccoli, the rack holds four bikes.
Claire’s worker Elise Guild by the new rack.
Travers, who was proud as a midwife at a birth, noted how the space between the end of the carrot and the broccoli is just the right size for a bike to lock up securely, whether U‑lock or chain. The green sprout at this end of the carrot is tiny; if it were too long, it could get knocked off.
Green, Travers & Criscuolo.
“Everything is thought out,” he said.
Green is the most accomplished of the many interns Travers has worked with, he said.
Click here for a story about the dynamic parking project that Green’s research also helped to launch in town.
Green said the other new racks, to be installed in the spring, might include a cupcake design in front of Katerina’s Bakery on Whitney or some more sedate creations, such as letter designs, perhaps an “N” and an “H” designed for one of the city parks.
Before she rushed off, Criscuolo was asked if the bike rack will inspire her to order more squashes, carrots, and broccoli. She said those were already the most popular of the vegetables she serves; she hardly has room to store any more.
Now a bike-rack salad — she just might add that to her menu, she said.
These are great! I walked by yesterday with a co-worker from fairfield county that I was showing around to different sites for a future event. She was very impressed with town and thought the rack was cool.
Also, I've been in town for awhile, but finally got a bike. I rode it downtown a few weekends back to visit the pop-up market on Broadway. I had come around the back by the gym, and walked all the way down the street to J. Crew before I saw a bike rack. Another kid with a bike was doign the same from teh other direction. We found a rack, by the cross walk, but it already had 4-5 bikes on it! We used some team work to squeeze our bikes in, but ended up having to tie his to a sign that really wasn't secure for his bike. Put racks like these on broadway please!