EBykr

“Alex Singer” sounds like a name you might more associate with the fumbling lead character in a Woody Allen movie than what many consider the most revered bicycle company in the history of cycling.

Yet this tiny shop, founded by its namesake nearly 70 years ago in Paris, which still occupies the same storefront on rue Victor-Hugo in Levallois-Perret, has been producing touring bicycles and tandems of exquisite form and muscular function for so long it can fairly be said to have defined the paradigm.

Indeed companies such as Rivendell and Kogswell are now applying Singer methods to production bikes available at less breathtaking prices than the originals. But nothing surpasses the real thing: for the builders at Cycles Alex Singer are what one calls “constructeurs”; they create the entire bicycle, often designing and building one-off custom racks and highly individualized lighting systems, to craft machines built not just to a purpose but to a person.

Alex Singer was born in 1905, at the tail end of the first bike boom, and soon became a club rider with “Clignancourt-Sportif”, a Parisian roadie group that in later years became uniquely involved with bicycle polo. After a few years playing the post-War-to-End-All-Wars equivalent of today’s spandex superheroes, Singer married and settled down, somewhat. He became an enthusiastic bicycle tourist, riding the great French brevets and randonnées; he also toured with his wife on a tandem, once riding far as Budapest.

Roads in France between the wars were far from the finest around and this must have provided Singer with inspiration for developing a bicycle better suited to the fast multi-day rides he enjoyed. In 1938 Singer opened a bicycle atelier under his full name at the rue Victor-Hugo address. The first five bicycles produced were all touring tandems.

Singer didn’t just build bicycles, he developed the craft of building bicycles. In 1939, just a year after opening his shop, Singer and his wife entered a competition on a tandem weighing 12.975 kg, or 28 lbs – with fenders, racks and lights! In 1946 he built a single bike weighing but 6.875 kg, or 15lbs, and also offered a production (non-custom) tandem weighing in at 15.94 kg, or 35 lbs. Remember, Singer bikes are made for long distance touring on bad roads in variable weather, and so always include fenders, lights and racks.

In 1964, two years before passing away, Singer accorded construction duties to longtime apprentice and nephew Ernest Csuka and his brother Roland. By then Ernest had been working with Singer for twenty years, and had ample opportunity for proving his skills to the old master. Roland passed away in 1994, and in 2002, Ernest entrusted the operation to his own son Olivier, who continues building bicycles that merit the reverence the world has bestowed upon Alex Singer products since their inception seventy years ago.

Standards at Cycles Alex Singer remain high: Csuka firmly believes tube sets offered today fail to achieve the caliber required for the sort of tandem Singer had always built – so the company no longer offer tandems. (They continue happily servicing their older tandems, of course.)

But single bikes, primarily randonneusses, continue to grow in the shop, though they are not easy to get. They make as few as fifty, and never as many as 100, bicycles per year, with production averaging (according to an article in Paris Evous) just 78 machines each year–with some authorities believing the number to be far lower. Prices are in the high five figures. No customer ever complains.

So, was Alex Singer’s the soul of a tinkerer, an engineer or an artist? His legacy – the lineage of bikes he created and present-day shop they come from – shout “oui” to all three.

As a French writer noted when visiting the shop in early 2006, “Those who love plastic and carbon fiber, just move on. Welcome to the kingdom of leather, rubber, and steel!” He also referred to Ernest Csuka as a “living treasure”. Each frame requires roughly sixty hours work, before painting and finish detailing.

Each frame is also made to measure for a particular client. Ernest and now Oliver will wait months for exactly the right parts needed to build a particular bicycle, even if a standard product might be more readily available. Apparently the word “standard” has no place in the Singer dictionary.

The Japanese, famously appreciative of perfection and demanding of it, not only favor the originals but support an entire subculture of framebuilders who make French-style – that is, Singer-style – bicycles for serious collectors in that country. Bikes that look almost precisely like Singer models from after WWII.

Technical innovation is nothing new to the firm, either. Certainly a company that built ultralight touring tandems in 1939 does not ignore engineering! These bikes, which have been described as “jewel-like”, have durable guts: in 1949 Singer applied for a patent on a cartridge-bearing bottom bracket that greatly improved the component’s reliability, so important to the far-traveling loaded touring market.

Not only did he design an effective, at the time revolutionary, bottom bracket, but he designed it so one could easily convert existing bottom bracket shells to accomodate his improved answer.

Singer also invented cam-actuated brakes, and his racks, fenders, headlight mounts, and other details have been copied not only by adulous Japanese builders but by other French greats, such as Gilles Berthoud, and now US designers such as the aforementioned Rivendell and Kogswell, both of whom released French-style bikes recently.

(Although Kogswell claims the inspiration for its porteur model came more from a René Herse design; Herse is similarly revered, but ran a more factory-like organization, with craftsmen working under him to build the bikes; Singers have been built by Alex, Ernest, or Olivier only, and are each signature machines.)

These homages to Singer are for the most part built in high-level ateliers in Japan or Taiwan, and are not, except for the Rivendell customs, made to measure.

So in effect, Cycles Alex Singer, a small shop founded toward the end of the first great bike boom, is the inspiration for a new generation of high quality bicycles that will populate the roads and trails of the next great bike boom. It remains fitting genuine Alex Singers will continue having a position at the lead of this effort entering the new millenium.

Photo credits: Electrospray, Rob O’Callaghan