Sam Fitzsimmons, Baltimore Legend

The Baltimore City Paper featured a profile of Baltimore and local bike-swap legend Sam Fitzsimmons back in 2001 that was recently brought forth from the archive and forwarded along by a reader. Sam is a collector, someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of antique bikes and what made them go. While the article is from a few years back, cyclists everywhere can likely relate the imagery to their local packed to the gills shop.

Step into his shop, if you can. The entire space, the very air, is thick with glinting metal. Bicycles ancient and modern, whole and fragmentary, stand hub to hub on the floor and on chest-level racks; frames, forks, chains, and sprockets hang on the walls and dangle from the rafters. It appears that there used to be walkways between the rows and racks, but most of these have been jammed up with still more bikes. The only way to get from the door to the rear of Fitzsimmons’ shop is to pick your way, almost on tiptoe, between two rows of two-wheelers, easily numbering in the hundreds. These are just part of his collection. He has three more floors full of bikes in storage near Hollins Market.