Moped Mecca on Manhattan Ave.

Ryan Due lounges on a red pleather couch in Greenpoint’s recently opened moped-exclusive service and retail store, the Orphanage. Bespectacled, perma-grinning and longhaired, Due is the proprietor of the New York City’s only one-stop shop for all things moped. He has a week’s beard, is nearly sleeved in tats (“Not a single moped-related tattoo”), and wears a non-functioning decorative Nintendo Game Boy wrist watch.
“Moped culture is a bunch of big dorks,” Due quips. “It’s skinny nerds like me who play with computers all day.”
The charmingly self-effacing Due and his “gang” of fellow mopeders, the Orphans, opened the Manhattan Avenue establishment in April, quickly making Greenpoint the new mecca of New York City’s moped culture. A kind of moped evangelist, Due is hoping his new business will help get more of the sputtery low-speed two-wheelers on the streets.
“At first I was just fixing them and selling them to friends, but then I realized I could sell them to other people,” Due says. “It’s a fun hobby that turned into a business.”
Mopeds (a portmanteau of motor and pedal) are distinct from scooters and motorcycles in that they are typically low-speed and can be powered, in part, by the rider’s bicycle-like pedaling. They carry few riding restrictions—in New York you don’t even have to get a special license—and low operating costs. After a heyday in the late 1970s energy crisis—more than 250,000 Americans reportedly owned one in 1977—most manufacturers stopped producing mopeds as gasoline prices normalized.
Enthusiasts like the Orphans are committed to bringing the bikes back in a big way. Through the social-networking site-slash-online governing body Moped Army, moped heads are now convening in cities across the country in the form of organized gangs—law-abiding associations of riders and amateur mechanics who meet for group rides, travel to other cities for rallies, and work on each other’s bikes. Moped Army lists 20 current branches across the states in almost as many cities. More than 50 additional branches are listed as unaffiliated or defunct since Moped Army’s founding in 1997. In New York, the Orphans and the Bushwick gang Mission 23 are leading the charge.
The Orphanage, run by Due and the other Orphans, is part repair shop, part retailer, part clubhouse. To hear Due tell it, the Orphanage didn’t start as a business venture. Rather, it evolved organically out of a DIY spirit he sees at the heart of moped culture. He only even thought to open the Orphanage after his hobby of buying up old mopeds and repairing them for resale in his nearby Greenpoint loft space reached critical mass.
“I had nine bikes in the bedroom, six in the shop area, and a giant pile outside, chained up,” he says. “The people I live with didn’t want them there anymore.”
With the founding of the Orphanage, Due is now free to buy up as many mopeds as he pleases. The store houses dozens of bikes. Some are chained up outside, some are on display in the street-facing front room, and others, in various states of disrepair, sit in the shop’s backroom. Everything’s for sale. From fully restored rides to “project bikes,” an Orphanage moped will run you anywhere from $150 to $2,000 at the high end.
Most afternoons, Due, 30, and fellow Orphans Nathan Isherwood, 28, and Bradley Carroll, 30, can be found in the Orphanage’s marigold-colored front office, or in the back shop repairing bikes. The three friends, all Greenpoint residents, represent the core of the Orphans gang, about 10 riders strong at the moment. Walk-in customers come and go as Due’s cat, Wallet, gets a belly rub from the stocking-capped Isherwood. Carroll, fairly covered in grease from the shop, takes a break to fix an old broken cassette player.
An obvious moped expert, Due confesses he is totally self-taught, as are Isherwood and Carroll. Due’s been tinkering with the bikes since he got his first in 2004 (his current moped still has some of the engine parts from that first bike). All mopeders do, he insists, because the bikes require continual repairs to stay in working condition.
“You don’t ride a moped without a screwdriver. You don’t ride a moped without a sparkplug wrench, or without a replacement sparkplug,” Due says. To prove the point, a customer walks in and tells Due her moped broke down on her way to the shop. She was going to get a new chain, but now the thing isn’t starting. Due quickly diagnoses the problem and says he can likely get the part she needs the next day.
Novice mopeders often come to the Orphanage for parts and repairs, Due explains, which he’ll happily oblige. But the Orphans advocate for learning to service the bikes yourself, almost as a badge of their burgeoning local moped culture. “There’s a sense of gratification with knowing about the thing you ride around on,” Due says.
Unlike other vehicle-centric sub-cultures, moped collecting is relatively cheap, and with the bikes usually being not much to look at, is mostly based on the imperative of just getting around. But, as happens in most collecting communities, some moped gangs are more affected in presentation than others. Scrappy, scruffy, and blue jean-clad, Due and company embody the no-frills East Coast moped culture they see as markedly different than the larger scenes taking place in California cities.
Much like West Coast car enthusiasts, California’s mopeders are all about speed and sleek looks, the gang explains. “In California they’re really pretty or really fast,” Due says. “In New York it’s all rat bikes,” Isherwood adds, bringing up a picture of what he says is a typically Californian moped on the store computer—a sleek powder-painted number he guesses has been rigged to go up to 70 miles an hour. True to the concept of mopeds as low-speed vehicles, the Orphans’ bikes typically don’t go more than 50, and often not even that fast.
But New York trails California in moped interest, something Due is determined to change with his little shop. It’s harder now to find cheap mopeds than it was five years ago, he points out, which is a sign moped interest is on the rise.
Still, “we’re behind compared to San Francisco and L.A.,” Due says, recalling a recent trip to a Bay Area rally, where he found a much larger community of mopeders than in New York. Moped Army lists 56 members in the San Francisco gang Creatures of the Loin; Sacramento’s Landsquids are 26 strong and L.A.’s Latebirds has 15 members. Those numbers don’t account for outlying gangs not affiliated with Moped Army, or individual riders not affiliated with a gang, but are still far above the numbers for the Orphans and Mission 23, which both hover at about 10.
More so even than sustaining a workable business model, it seems the Orphanage’s main project is providing a context for promoting the cost-efficient method of transportation and spreading the good word moped. And it’s easy to see the charismatic Due as a kind of Messiah to New York’s growing population of moped disciples.
“Any moped we can put on the road is good for us,” Due enthuses.
The Orphanage is located at 1138 Manhattan Ave. in Greenpoint. The Orphans will be hosting a barbecue at Pete’s Candy Store on June 29. Pete’s Candy Story is located at 709 Lorimer St. in Williamsburg.