It was 2008 when I visited Revolution Cafe in the Mission District for the first time. I couldn’t believe it: The bohemian life I had romanticized in my teenage years seemed to be encapsulated in this place. People talking about literature? Sí señor. Live music every day? Yes sir. The place and its energy fascinated me. I felt creative here, so I brought my journal, wrote, and drank beer.
One evening in 2014, I was at my favorite table when I wrote these verses: “The air comes in and travels throughout this machine in movement. It purifies it. Suddenly, the chains are broken. Free, I rode, I rode, and I rode.” That evening I penned a poem to that feeling I get when I ride my bike.
Revolution Cafe is now gone. It was a tragic moment for the community, a painful one. San Franciscans have seen many of the places they loved close their doors: Anchor Brewing, the Clay Theater, Club Deluxe, and Lucky 13 to mention just a few. Some places and people are physically gone forever but their memories never die. (The Beatles expressed it better than I ever could in “In My Life.”) In SF, though, no one can express that feeling better than San Francisco bike messengers.
Beers and tears
Every time a member of this community dies, regardless of the cause, messengers gather at South Park in the South of Market, where as many as 200 people pay tribute by giving speeches or by telling stories about the individual whose life is being celebrated. Laughter, tears, and beers flow while they let these words sink in.
The group then proceeds to ride to Agua Vista Park by Mission Bay, where attendees throw the bike of their friend and colleague off the pier. More stories, more beer, more laughs, and more tears run as the bicycle sinks into the murky waters of this part of the bay. These rides are often held on Friday nights after messengers get off work.
For Paul Valdez, an organizer of the yearly Ride of Silence in San Francisco — a memorial for all bikers killed on the streets, often marked with ghost bikes — it’s important to pay respect to messengers’ legacy in the local cycling community.
“What we have been doing for the last two years in the Ride of Silence is to include a stop at South Park to honor the fallen messengers. That is their heaven. That is their refuge,” Valdez said.
Rasul Grayson, who did seven years of messenger work starting in 2015 until a bad fall, has been to more than one messenger memorial. He remembers the one for Seth Allen in 2020 as a big one.
When the bike comes rolling down from the dock, everyone just goes screaming. People reach out and touch the bike as it’s going over the pier.
former sf bike messenger rasul grayson
Grayson says it’s an honor to have been part of such a genuine experience. “We line up down the dock, hella messengers. It’s late at night and it’s dark,” he recounts.
“Everyone’s drinking and hanging out, and then when the bike comes rolling down from the dock, everyone just goes screaming,” Grayson adds. “People reach out and touch the bike as it’s going over the pier. We all just toss it in there and just watch it sink and have that moment, all together for the person who’s passed.”
The San Francisco tradition goes back decades, according to longtime messenger Shark, a mononymous legend in the community who used to work in a kilt. Shark started his local messenger days in 1977, and did not stop until the pandemic hit in 2020. That’s 44 years riding by buses, across tracks and foggy mornings delivering parcels throughout the city.
Shark remembers being part of the first memorial in 1981, for a messenger named Glenn Adrian. He says they threw his bike and a six-pack of Rainier beer off Pier 9, because it creeped them out to have a dead man’s bike in their office. The tradition eventually moved to its current location after a harbor pilot told them they couldn’t do that there.
When his time comes, Shark says his bike will not go in the water: “This one goes in the Smithsonian, dammit. She’s earned it.”
Risky streets
The evening of Nov. 17, 2000, was doubly painful for Shark. Just as he and others were leaving Agua Vista after a wake, one messenger, Chris Robertson, was run over by a truck and killed.
Former SF messenger (and Frisc co-founder) Jeremy LaCroix had spoken with Robertson just a few minutes before he died. It was their first chance to talk after seeing each other on the streets many times. They made plans to hang out before parting ways.
LaCroix started messenger work here in 1997. He had ridden in heat and snow back in his native Boston, but nothing prepared him for his new environs. San Francisco was different; the hills, the Muni tracks, the fog, and the tension between messengers and the cops and Muni, made city streets particularly dangerous. Additionally, most companies did not offer health insurance.
He has his own tragic story to share. “I go down Market Street and there’s a sheet over the train tracks. It turned out to be this guy Casey Moe,” LaCroix says. “I’ll never forget his name because it was my first day” as a local messenger.
LaCroix remembers just one messenger killed in the year and a half he was a messenger in Boston. Three died in his first four days in SF.
It’s unknown how many bikes could be in the water off Agua Vista’s pier, but Shark says he’s attended a lot of funerals. Port of SF spokesperson Justin Berton says no one at the Port office knows of any bikes recovered from the site. In fact, no one there had even heard of the tradition.
The Frisc found one person, other than messengers, who claims to have seen bikes in the water. Vincent Gutierrez has been fishing from the pier since 1974, and he says he has used a magnet to take about 10 bikes out of the water because his lines kept getting caught on them.
Gutierrez says he didn’t know what the bikes represented, or else he would have left them alone. He did not have photos or other evidence of his extractions. (The Frisc asked a certified diver if they would be willing to search for bikes. The diver declined, citing potentially dangerous conditions in the murky water.)
For the ex-messenger Grayson, the tradition will forever honor the community: “I’ve never been part of something so heartfelt in terms of death and grief within the context of American culture of somebody’s passing, and in such a celebratory way. Lots of good times, lots of sincerity, lots of tears. Lots of beer and celebration of life.”
