Consumer alert: bike rack edition. Until a few weeks ago, the corner of Pine and 11th had a bike store on it, and so there's this feeling in the air that this corner might be a good place to lock up a bike, kind of a muscle-memory thing, since this corner used to be so friendly to bikes, used to be the place where you could go to fill up your tires with an automatic pump instead of having to pump the pump yourself, and buy bike lights, and flirt with Velo employees. But now that Velo has moved downtown and the former entryway to the bike store has become a face-picking station for junkies, this rack has become the worst place to lock up your bike in America. If you leave it just for a few daylight hours, you're probably okay, but if you leave it overnight? Now that there are no eyes on the street anymore? Expect it to be dismembered beyond recognition.

I left mine there overnight inadvertently recently—The Stranger's office is about 100 inches away—and returned to find it missing a bike seat. Not even a nice bike seat, just some crummy squishy one of very little value. Why the hell would someone even want it? I noticed its absence when I went to get on my bike the next day to get to a meeting I was late for, and didn't have a spare half hour to wheel it up to 20/20 Cycle, so I left it for another night, because I am a blooming idiot, and the next day the back tire was gone too. The rear of the frame resting on the sidewalk, the chain in a sad-sack pile. So then I took it to 20/20 Cycle, and an employee said he's heard from other people that their bikes are getting stripped at this exact corner.

On the other side of where Velo used to be, there's another bike rack, and walking to work recently I came across this poor sucker: