(Photo: M.Andersen/BikePortland)
Street Books, Portland’s five-year-old free private book-lending library, will be spending more time on Portland’s east side this summer.
Splendid Cycles, the cargo bike store at the north end of the eastside’s Springwater on the Willamette path, will donate a new, fully built-up Bullitt cargo bike, and Jeff Lauten of Badger Bikes will donate a handbuilt water-tight box to match.
Street Books, which we profiled last summer, launched its fifth lending season on Tuesday.
“We have long wanted to expand our Street Books shifts and spend more time over on the East side and throughout more inclement weather,” Street Books volunteer Diana Rempe wrote in an email to BikePortland. “We really couldn’t do it on the bike we have, as much as we love it. We spent time last year talking with folks about possibilities and we were stunned and amazed when Barb and Joel at Splendid offered to DONATE a bike to us. What an incredible act of generosity from a small business owner.”
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We’ve written in the past about Splendid Cycles, a literal mom-and-pop shop that has become the leading American seller of Denmark’s Bullitt-brand cargo bikes, and also about Jeff Lauten, whose cargo-bike-box building operation grew from a hobby for a full-time dad to a part-time job that took over half his basement.
Street Books will get the new bike later in the summer, once Lauten’s box is finished.
“Though we dearly love our first bike, we recognize the wisdom in having a second bike that is less creaky, and can go farther, faster,” Rempe wrote.