"We have this incredible opportunity in cities for the bicycle to be a realistic and practical form of transportation-fast, easy, convenient, fun," says 34-year-old Ezra Caldwell, whose custom bike-building business, Fast Boy Cycles, in New York City, offers both a joyful ride and a thing of beauty.

"These are bikes you have to have a relationship with," Caldwell says of his soulful single-speeds. "Pure, simple and clean" is the operative aesthetic of the bikes, with features he handcrafts in materials meant "to improve with age"-wood handlebars and fenders, leather saddles, patinaed metal frames. "What I'm making has a classic appeal, yet these are not low-tech bikes. They are performance bikes."

Working alone in a small shop in a Harlem brownstone, Caldwell explains that "from conception to completion, each bike is thought out to the detail-what it's for, how it should look-and built to be precisely that." His clients include people like the London-based equity manager who first admired a Fast Boy bike on a Manhattan street and promptly ordered one for his office commute. "He can afford a driver," says Caldwell, "but he sits at a computer all day, crunching numbers. At the end of that day, he wants a real experience."

Caldwell's own path has been circuitous, very much about the journey. Growing up in Vermont, where "everyone and his father is in construction" (his own dad is a wood furniture craftsman), he worked summers on building crews, absorbing "a hands-on, practical sensibility about making stuff." At 18 he spent six months in a refugee resettlement camp in El Salvador, teaching war-wounded combatants to make tourist items in a makeshift jungle wood shop. Back then
he thought art should be about "service," not "self-exploration, navel gazing and arty-farty bollocks." At the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, he dabbled in industrial design and crafts, then-always ath­letically coordinated-impulsively switched his major to dance. Moving to New York in 1999, he made his name as a dancer, teacher and choreographer of "wildly avant-garde" performances before quitting last summer to turn his life-long love of bikes into a full-time business.

"I've done quite a flip over the years," says Caldwell. "When I was dancing, I realized the value of fine art, of art for art's sake. I lost the hardcore edge of art must be useful." Now he has the best of both worlds: "As an artist, I'm making the most elegant and useful machine there is."