De-railed: Aurora charity bike shop searching hard for a new home

AURORA | For the past decade, Ernie Clark’s focus has been bikes and the local children who need them.

Last Christmas, Clark and his team of volunteers at the Second Chance Bike Shop, some of them homeless, repaired and gave away 400 bikes. A few weeks later, they gave away another 100.

But these days, Clark is less concerned about bikes and more concerned about where the shop will operate from.

After 18 months in the basement of Kim Robards Dance studio at East Colfax Avenue and Del Mar Parkway, Clark got word this month that he and his helpers have to leave.

Clark said the crew will work until Sunday, but after that he isn’t sure about the future. When they moved to the dance studio’s basement they only expected to be there for about six months and find a new home, but that effort keeps coming up empty.

“I’m going bananas over here because I have all of this stuff and nowhere to go,” Clark said of the thousands of bikes, mountains of spare parts and tool collection he has amassed in the jam-packed basement.

The shop has operated out of the basement rent-free since they moved there in 2013 from a garage behind the old Aurora Warms the Night headquarters on Dayton Street, north of Colfax. The new home was more spacious and provided the crews a warm place to work in the winter months, but it was never meant to be permanent.

LaRana Skalicky, associate executive director of Kim Robards Dance, said the dance studio needs the space for storage as they prepare to move into a much larger location across the street sometime late this year. When that move happens, Skalicky said the bike shop would have to move anyway.

Plus, she said, some customers complained about the men working on the bikes using foul language and sometimes appearing to loiter on the loading dock behind the studio.

“There have been some concerns expressed,” she said.

Skalicy said the studio supports Clark’s efforts and doesn’t have any animosity toward him and his crew, but the time had come for the bike shop to find a more permanent home.

For his part, Clark had no complaints about the dance studio.

“They have been patient and patient and patient,” he said.

Clark said he is just desperate to find a new home for the bike shop.

“Right now I will take anything,” he said Thursday standing next to a green Huffy 10-speed in the studio’s basement. “If I have to downsize, that’s what I’ll do.”

Clark’s labor of love began 10 years ago when he started helping a former firefighter who repaired bikes in a single-car garage for needy kids. That man stepped aside after a while and Clark took over, eventually moving to the Dayton Street location before the dance studio. Along the way, local homeless men started volunteering their time in exchange for a working bike and a constructive place to pass the time.

Clark said he’s not just worried about what will happen to all the bikes he has — dozens of which are repaired and ready to be donated to kids who need them — but the crews who rely on the shop for some stability.

He said he plans to go to city council on Monday in hopes he can find somewhere to move the shop to.

Even with the shop’s future murky at best, people still streamed to Clark on Thursday either to get a bike, or to get some work done on theirs.

Quidman Flemings, a hair stylist at Another Phase Beauty Salon a few doors down Florence Street from the shop, stopped by the shop to see if Clark could fix his two sons’ bikes.

Clark said no problem and when Flemings asked how much it would cost, Clark said the same he thing he says to everyone: don’t worry about it.

“I think the neighborhood is going to lose something special,” Flemings said of the shop.

Later that day, two men swung by and Clark and his right-hand man, Howard Jarrett, slapped new brake pads on one of their bikes and sent them on their away. Again, no charge.

City Councilwoman Sally Mounier, whose north Aurora ward includes the bike shop, said she has been scrambling in recent months to find the shop a new home.

“There is literally nothing, nothing available that people will give generously,” she said.

Hopefully, Mounier said, someone with space will step up and help out because the program is crucial for the neighborhood.

“I gotta believe that something is gonna break open for Ernie, I just gotta believe that,” she said. “It would be nice if we were all as generous as he is.”