• 718 Cyclery, Inc.

  461 Seventh Ave., nr. 16th St., Park Slope 347-457-5760

  Unless you happen to be a messenger, city bike shops can be intimidating. Enter 718 Cyclery in all its pretension-free glory. The new South Slope store focuses on what the owner Joe Nocella calls “collaborative builds.” Customers choose from new and vintage frames (from $750), then select clearly priced components by brands like Surly, Nitto, Chris King, and Bike Thomson. “There’s nothing proprietary about what we do,” says Nocella, who invites customers to watch as he assembles their bikes. The shop also offers free weekly classes covering, for example, how to fix a flat or how to build a wheel.

From the 2011 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine