After a Hall of Fame mountain biking career, Baltimore’s Marla Streb is striking out into a new, much-anticipated adventure this summer. With husband Mark Fitzgerald, Streb will be opening the HandleBar Café and Bike Shop in Fells Point, a project which earned the support of the City’s Board of Estimates last week.
“It’s been a dream I’ve been playing around with for what seems like 20 years,” said Streb, who retired from full-time racing five years ago after having her second child. The hope is that the café and shop, which will serve beer and food, and sell new bikes and do repairs, will be open for business by the end of June. It’s a timeframe she admits may be optimistic. “But that’s the goal,” she said.
Streb said she and her husband closed on the former warehouse at 511 S. Caroline Street in January. By the end of this week, they expect to finalize a $500,000 start-up renovation loan from the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, as well as other private financing. The overall cost of redeveloping the long-vacant building, which sits on otherwise desolate block between Eastern Avenue and Fleet Street, is expected to run to more than $1.3 million.
“We’re all in, throwing everything on the table and rolling dice,” said the former X Games, U.S. National, and World Cup mountain biking champion, with a laugh. “It’s not like I’m risk averse.”
On a more serious note, Streb said that bicycle-themed pub and bike shop combination is a model that’s worked elsewhere in the U.S.—the Mojo Bicycle Café in San Francisco, for example—and beyond. (Closer to home, Pittsburgh has a popular bike-themed café/pub, but without a shop.) She added that they’ve already hired a “celebrity” chef, who she won’t name yet, but someone who also happens to be an avid cyclist. The café, which will include a bar as well as communal tables and seat 75 inside, will mostly likely focus on burritos and pizza, craft beer, and freshly roasted coffee. They’ll even make deliveries—by cargo bike—within a three-mile radius. “Pizza travels well,” Streb said.
And, in fact, plans call for spinning and yoga studios upstairs in the 7,000-square-foot space, along with offices for what she called “like-minded” nonprofits. (Think bicycle and/or environmental advocacy organizations.) The expectation is that the café and bike shop, with a permit for outdoor seating, will become something of a hub for city’s growing number of bicyclists—a place to meet up for coffee and a bite before a group ride or pizza and a beer afterwards.
“We’re also going to invest in landscaping and try to create some green space out front,” added Streb, who currently works part-time with Bike Maryland, a statewide nonprofit bicycling advocacy organization. “And we’re looking for funds for a bicycle-themed mural on the big, west-facing, exterior wall. It’s kind of bleak there now.”
She added that she and her husband tried to launch a similar effort four years ago in Federal Hill, a project that ultimately never got off the ground—which she’s thankful for in hindsight. “The timing is better now,” Streb says. “There’s more people bicycling, I see them year around now, and there’s more bike lanes. With more bike infrastructure on the way, the number of young people moving into the city increasing—not that you have to be young to ride a bike, but you do have to feel safe—the city’s bicycle culture is only going to grow. Our hope is to encourage all that, to be good neighbors, to be a part of it.”
