Big museums garner the lion’s share of headlines, but the best tourists know that small, obscure museums make a city worth exploring. It’s exciting to share an opportunity lurking in the Twin Cities, a chance to partner with a quaint museum that could really turn your main street, cultural district or post-industrial facility into a small-scale destination for the curious.
I’m talking about the Cycling Museum of Minnesota (CMM), a “museum in progress” that would offer one of the top bicycle collections in North America — if it can find a space to display it. After losing its location in Bloomington this year, the museum’s board is in search of a new home. Leaders are now taking calls and are willing to work with suitors on details.
The bicycle’s place in history
Bicycle history is a fascinating case of slow accumulation of momentum followed by rapid change, seemingly all at once. After decades of two-wheeled stagnation, bicycle technology exploded in the late 19th century, leading to a boom that swept through American and European society. As CMM board member Juston Anderson explained, at one point there were even two separate U.S. patent offices: one for bicycle inventions, and another for everything else.
That’s the period where you’ll find one Anderson’s personal favorites from the CMM collection.
“I like the Minnesota-made bikes that were originally bought and sold in Minnesota [like] the 1887 Victor Highweel,” Anderson said, describing distinctive one-big-one-small wheel bikes. “It has a 54” wheel, [and] I’ve got 8 centuries on that bike.”
(For your information, a century is a 100-mile ride in any given day, an age-old accomplishment.)
Other interesting museum bikes from that period include some of the first machines to use pneumatic tubes, when the invention of the rubber tire made bicycling more comfortable and appealing for a wider range of people. Before that time, bicycle wheels had solid tires; you can only imagine how those worked atop the bumpy cobblestone or dirt roads of the time.
“The early pneumatics are cool,” Anderson said. “The transitional period between the hard tire, the cushion tire, and the pneumatic tire is a favorite era of bikes for me. There was so much innovation at that time, a new form of transportation that was sweeping the world.”
Bicycles dramatically impacted society during that period, offering affordable personal mobility that was an upgrade over walking. As a result, before automobiles and streetcars dominated roads in the 20th century, bicycles were everywhere. Most famously, as Susan B. Anthony once quipped, they “emancipated” middle-class women to travel through cities on their own for the first time.
A museum was born
The CMM began when Juston Anderson had a pivotal conversation with a friend, who, upon viewing his bike-stuffed garage, muttered that they should be in a museum. Most avid cyclists have an “N+1” problem when it comes to bicycles: There’s always one more bike you’d like to acquire. My sense is that he had that problem much, much worse than myself.
Over the last 15 years, the CMM became a nonprofit, and the collection grew to over 100 interesting bicycles from over a century of technological change. The museum has everything from a 1901 Minneapolis-made Rainmaker to a 1979 Mongoose BMX to a beautiful blue Chris Kvale road bike from 1980, a very early example of his work.
(Kvale is a famous local custom bike builder who has been welding bikes for decades in south Minneapolis.)
The museum got its public launch at the Minnesota State Fair in 2012, when Anderson and some other volunteers got their hands on some space in one of the massive fairground buildings. They curated 22 bicycles from their pooled collections, and the result was a smash hit. Thousands of people walked through the exhibit and were enamored by the display. That planted the seed for the future.
Since then, the museum has bounced around, never really finding any place perfectly suited to its assets. For a while they were in the upstairs space above the Recovery Bicycle shop in northeast Minneapolis, a tiny spot on Central Avenue. They then moved to St. Mark’s Church near Loring Park, on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, where they were housed in a basement for years.
Finally, they moved into the Quality Bicycle Products headquarters, the bicycle company in Bloomington that distributes bikes and bike parts all across the hemisphere. Even that match, obscure as it was, is coming to an end this year; QBP needs the space for other purposes.
The nomadic existence reflects a struggle that many museums and public spaces have faced over the last five years.
“When the pandemic came, things just changed,” Anderson told me. “We had so many things lined up, and it all came to a screeching halt.”
Today, this has left the CMM in a lurch, looking for bicycle love in all the wrong places. For such an interesting museum, you’d think there’d be a suitor out there somewhere. The organization could use a creative grant writer or institutional opportunity, something that might match up with its unique needs. The museum would ideally like somewhere with public exhibit space, a back room for office needs, and (of course) a large storage room for the scores of bicycles.
It’s the kind of thing that seems perfect for a downtown main street or local neighborhood matching grant, sometimes available for nonprofit institutions like this. The only thing missing here is a matchmaker, some ambitious council member or business leader looking to revitalize an old main street. Ideally it might be somewhere close to a regional bike trail, making the museum a perfect destination for group rides.
“It’s a rare opportunity to be able to acquire a ready-to-go museum,” Anderson said. “I just hope somebody realizes that, and we can pair together and get a great relationship worked out. If we could call a place home and have open hours, I think that would be just fantastic.”
All we need now is a meet cute.
