For more than a decade, Bike Club has enriched the lives of thousands of kids in Tulsa’s elementary and middle schools, offering bike lessons, cycling gear, and general life skills to boot. This year, their after-school programming spans 37 TPS locations, reaching just under 700 students. It takes a ton of often invisible work to maintain a far-reaching program like this, and now comes a visible, hard-earned reward as payoff: their very own standalone headquarters next to Bales Park in West Tulsa.
Bike Club was founded in 2014 by Mike Wozniak, who opened Soundpony in 2006, and Jason Whorton, who in 2008 started building and donating bikes for kids through his nonprofit, Humble Sons Bike Company. “We use the bikes to connect,” Wozniak explained. “We socially connect peer to peer, adult mentor to student, and then there’s the connection to nature.” And there’s no better place to facilitate these connections than their beautiful new home, designed by Shane Hood of Align Design Group, which nestles up to a nine-mile trail system (with trails Bike Club actually helped build).
Wozniak and Whorton described Hood’s team of architects as true collaborators, iterating as needed and thinking of every detail to improve on the logistics of getting bikes in, out, and through the space. “They really listened to us. We explained our needs, and they delivered on that … to a T,” Wozniak said. “The efficiency of our operation has really increased.”
Their former space was a shuttered TPS school, which served them well, but, like most school buildings, featured long hallways, narrow doorways, and lots of stairs—in other words, it was not designed for lugging around a bunch of bikes. Now they have trail access, an open-plan common area flooded with natural light, dedicated classrooms, a big patio, a well-stocked shop space, and roll-up doors so they can pull their trucks right up to the building and easily wheel bikes all the way through.
It’s important to Bike Club that the beautiful new structure isn’t some kind of fortress devoid of any consideration of the neighborhood, which includes Tulsa Housing Authority apartments and the ballfields at Bales Park. The new HQ takes into account not only the human neighbors but the landscape that makes the space what it is. To create the pad for the patio, a few trees had to come down, but they didn’t go to waste: They were repurposed for the bench tops. Whorton explained how all the table legs, the fire pits, the rails, the gates, and the “portal” from the patio to the forest trails were all made from scrap metal they bought. “That's how we were able to extend the budget and have really cool things,” he said. “We kind of used these simple elements but elevated them.”