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Meet Don Pedrito, the Schwinn King of East Harlem

By Gustavo Solis | August 25, 2015 10:13am
 The 63-year-old who retired from a dry cleaner business where he worked for 45 years is keeping busy by restoring old Schwinn bicycles in his workshop on East 119th Street and Second Avenue.
Don Pedrito
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EAST HARLEM— In a garage on an empty lot near 119th Street and Second Avenue, a man known as “Don Pedrito” turns rusted, worn-out pieces of metal into beautiful custom bicycles.

Pedrito, who doesn't like to tell people his full name -- "there’s no reason to, everybody knows me by Don Pedrito" -- has been restoring Schwinn bicycles since retiring from a dry cleaner store in 2013.

He picks them up from friends in The Bronx and New Jersey, and has flown as far as his native Puerto Rico to collect old frames.

Some have speakers, old-school child seats, original shin guards, bells, and Puerto Rican flags. One has a speedometer and another a metal swan that used to sit in the hood of a car, he said.

“It’s my hobby,” said Pedrito, 63. “I like to be out here working, I don’t want to sit in front of the TV.”

He is not out there every day, but he tries his best to open the shop whenever he has some free time, he said.

“Sometimes my wife takes me to go shopping,” he said Friday. “So yesterday I was all day in New Jersey. Today she didn’t go shopping.”

Dozens of tires, tools, old equipment and bike parts line the walls of his workshop. Toward the back there are two layers of custom bicycles.

Pedrito developed a love for Schwinns at an early age. While growing up in Puerto Rico, his father, a carpenter, used to ride the family’s only bike to and from work every day.

“I would wait for him to come home so I could go ride the bike,” he said.

He started collecting bikes a few years before retiring from a dry cleaner business on the Upper East Side. Pedrito had done everything from mop the floor, repair the machines, dry clean, and manage the store, he said.

“I never missed a day of work in 45 years,” he said. “I like to work, that’s why I did it for 45 years.”

He takes the same approach in retirement.

Pedrito doesn’t just fix old bicycles. He repairs old motorcycles and trucks. He has a 1990 Ford F-150 and a 1986 Kawasaki Vulcan. He also does odd jobs for the local church.

Next weekend the Macedonian Pentecostal Church plans to have an annual end-of-summer block party on the empty lot on East 119th Street. To prepare for the event, Don Pedrito is restoring a broken ice box someone else was going to dump.

“He was going to throw it away because the wheel was broken and it doesn’t have a door,” he said.  “I can fix that.”