This interview is incredible [link to mp3]. Listen to it if you are a lover of electro and electronic music. His stories are the stuff of legend.

womenaresociety:

Women With Wrenches: Female Bike Mechanics on the Rise in New York City

On most days, Katlyn Hershman can be found smeared with grease, plying her skills as a mechanic at Bike Works NYC, a shop on the Lower East Side. When she answers the store phone, though, all that toil and expertise can suddenly seem invisible.

“Guys automatically ask for the mechanic,” she said. “But I don’t really take it personally.”

Ms. Hershman, 25, has a loyal clientele of cyclists, both men and women. And she has the satisfaction of being one of a small but growing number of New York women making their mark in a trade that was a men-only preserve not so long ago.

In 1994, Karen Overton, a cycling advocate, founded Recycle-a-Bicycle in Manhattan as an after-school program to teach teenagers the basics of bicycle repair. To encourage girls to sign up, and to counter some parents’ objections that working on bikes was strictly for boys, she searched for female mechanics qualified to help teach.

The pickings were slim. “I found women in bike shops who did sales,” Ms. Overton, 48, said. “But there were next to none hired as mechanics.”

Since then, as the number of cyclists in the city has soared — rising 30 percent from 2001 to 2008, according to a recent report by the Department of City Planning — so have the ranks of women riding bikes. Though male cyclists still outnumber them, the ratio has shrunk every year since 2003, to about three to one, according to current estimates.

…

Yet Ms. Dyer said she had to fight for respect in the male-dominated world of bike shops. “As a girl, you’re typically lumped into the category of ‘doesn’t know a thing,’ ” she said. “There’s a certain macho attitude that women can get intimidated by.”

Another Ladies Night alumna — K. T. Higgins, the founder of the Bushwick Bike Shop in Brooklyn, had a similar struggle. After arriving in New York in 1998 with little more than a BMX bike, Ms. Higgins worked as a bicycle messenger while doing sales work and fixing flats at Manhattan shops like Larry & Jeff’s and Sid’s Bikes.

Sensing that male mechanics “weren’t really taking me seriously,” she enrolled in two months of mechanics courses at the United Bicycle Institute in Portland, Ore. Upon her return to New York, she landed a mechanic’s job at Bicycle Doctor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and eventually opened her own shop.

Not all female mechanics are bothered by the gender bias. Ms. Hershman of Bike Works said that after years spent in the metalworking studio at Pratt Institute, she was accustomed to working alongside men.

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Hershman, flanked by two male mechanics, was hunched over a messenger’s fixed-gear bike, adding extra links to its chain. The messenger, Art Stowers, 28, sat on a bench nearby.

“It must be tough being a chick in this business,” he said. “But I come to Katlyn if there’s anything I can’t fix myself. She just knows more than me.”

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Alfred Eisenstaedt, Newly-Constructed Ramp Curving Graceful Against the Sky, New York World’s Fair. Gelatin silver print, 1939.