Plum Tree Rack

A couple weeks ago, I showed a picture of a purple rack in one of my posts.

I kept meaning to come back and talk about that beauty. So here's the story.

That rack was built by local artist Hazen Audel and it now lives at Maddie's preschool, Plum Tree.

The point of the rack is more to serve as a place to lean your bike, than it is for locking up bikes. A growing number of families at the preschool are biking more. Many bike set ups include a trailer or a trail-a-bike, or other cumbersome kid hauling solution. These types of bike trains are hard to park and often the kickstands on bikes don't hold up with a trailer.

Plum Tree doesn't have a suitable spot to lean such bike contraptions, so the school got this rack for leaning. Although, when I picked Maddie up last Friday, a parent had locked their bike to the rack. So you can lock too.

I need to take more pictures with a better camera to do this rack justice. It's really neat and pretty. It's powder coated dark blue and is sponged with purple. Hazen thought that as it weathered, the kids would have fun sponging it with different colors of paint. There are little animals carved into a big plate of 1/2 inch steel. He said it was cut with water jets? Does that make sense?

There's also a cool little cut-out of a bike in there. I think the point of that is to inform people that it's ok to lean bikes up against it.

I will take more pics this week.

In the meantime, if you want to see it up close, you can check it out at 20th and Sherman.

I'm filing this under "sucky racks" so that it is easily found in the future. This is clearly not a sucky rack.