Jul 19 2008
Event Calendar
Boat/Bike Events At Corona Park/Meadow Lake
Jim Wilson developed this initial list to get ideas on the table. Events don’t just happen, they require significant levels of energy, funding and sponsorship to assure one simple thing — that people enjoy themselves.
As all ideas are welcome, please be concrete: names, places, dates, partner venues, likely sponsors and contacts and so on.
Idea and Sponsorship List
Bike Festival: Exhibition and show of all types of bicycles, from antique, through classic, kustom, MTB, BMX, velomobiles, recumbents, novelty bikes.
Annual Meadow Lake Raft Race: Craft built from non-marine materials raced by teams of up to six members per craft.
Pedicab Grand Prix: Closed course raced by pedicabs with passengers in costume on board.
Submarine Races: Semi-submersible craft built and raced by artistic or engineering-oriented teams. Semi-submersible craft, with the rider’s head above the surface when submerged, would be well suited to Meadow Lake, since it’s too shallow (4′ deep) for fully-submersible craft.
Artist’s Soap-Box Derby: I think I started this trend in 1975, when I suggested the concept as a 1976 Bicentennial event in Philadelphia, to be organized by the South St. Arts Community in conjunction with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We ended up not doing it, but the idea entered the American arts-community zeitgeist then, and has happened in many other places since then, most notably in San Francisco.
A possible drawback is that I haven’t noticed much in the way of hills in Corona Park. Neither did Philadelphia, but there, my idea was to lay a plywood track surface down the front steps of the Art Museum- the ones later made famous by the movie “Rocky”, in which the protagonist-in-training ran up and down the incredibly long and steep flight of steps.
Le Tour de Stationaire: A bikes-on-rollers race with four racers per heat. The Champion wins a nice bike (probably sponsor-donated). Dave Perry of Bike Works has a complete setup of four rollers available, and I imagine he’d be interested in organizing the event. This event has the potential to be quite popular, as it permits racing while simultaneously drinking beer.
Bicycle and Bike Parts Swap Meet- monthly or even weekly. Everybody loves a swap meet, and this would be a great way to bring bike-oriented people in from the other boroughs, and even from out of town. This is one instance in which the park’s location in an overly-car-oriented area works in our favor, since dealers can easily bring in vanloads of merchandise. Local bike shops and amateur bike-wrenchers have tons of frames and parts laying around, potentially for sale. Collectors always have bikes they’d like to de-access from their collections when they acquire better examples. Moderate dealer fees would generate useful amounts of money to support other bike events in the park.
Corona Bicycle Orchestra Concerts. Godfried-Willem Raes’s 2nd Symphony For Singing Bicycles is an avante garde musical piece based upon bicycles converted into musical instruments. Typical bike-tire-driven lighting generators have their current delivered to small loudspeakers fitted to one end of various lengths of 8″ PVC plastic pipe, which are mounted to either 12 or 24 bicycles. The pitch of each “instrument” is determined by the length of the tube, as in pipe organs and trombones. The symphony consists of choreography of the rolling bikes making up the orchestra. A possible venue for regular performances would be the circular pavement surrounding the Unisphere- the landmark centerpiece of Corona Park.
Bicycle Parade- Disneyland has a popular “Electrical Parade” every night; a weekly or monthly Bicycle Parade would be equally popular event with Corona Park-goers. This event would also be an excellent way of developing human-powered parade vehicles for use in an annual Bicycle Parade in Manhattan or elsewhere. Ongoing workshops taking advantage of the large area of the park for parade vehicle construction would further advance the possibility.
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