The stairway at Sourland Cycles had always been a problem.
The link between the historic, 1860’s-era part of the building on East Broad Street and the newer, more modern section of the store was functional. But over the years, it had seemed to owner Mike Gray that nothing he and the staff ever did to try to spruce the area up had worked.
Sourland Cycles hosts numerous bike rides throughout the nearby natural setting that inspired the store name. There are photos of nature scenes throughout the shop — but stock photos just weren’t cutting it when it came to the stairway wall.
Then one day last year, a customer named Myles Cavanaugh was shopping in the Hopewell Borough store. An avid cyclist as well as an acclaimed painter, Cavanaugh was a regular at Sourland Cycles.
“A colleague whispered to me to see if Myles had free time to (paint a mural),” Gray remembers. “Myles is a friend and a great artist — my wife and I have some of his fine art on the walls in our house. We asked him, and he jumped at the chance to do something a little larger format, a little more fun.”
The wall is in a part of the store where mountain bikes are usually displayed. Gray knew that he wanted the mural to feature the types of boulders that can be seen throughout the Sourland Mountain area.
“I asked some friends, riders, to send me some pictures of Sourland scenes,” Gray says. “I left it to Myles to pick out which he thought would work out well. I try not too interfere with artists too much, but gave him a little input on the design, that it had to serve as a backdrop for bikes as well as a mural.”
Cavanaugh is not only a friend and customer. He has also ridden with Gray on the very trails the latter was hoping to depict.
“He feels connected to it,” Gray says. “He’s lived in the area for years, he bikes there all the time. I don’t think he hesitated for more than 10 seconds before saying ‘Yeah.’”
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Cavanaugh lives in Lambertville and has a studio in Stockton. “This was definitely something that was up my alley,” Cavanaugh says. “I painted it as if it were one of my paintings. I know Mike because we used to ride together.”
While Cavanaugh works mostly in oil, the mural was painted using acrylics. He says it took around two weeks for the 12-by-12-foot mural to come together.
“I don’t do a lot of murals, necessarily,” he says. “A lot of my paintings are of area scenes, of the Delaware River, in Hopewell, in the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm area. I’m mostly known for impressionist landscapes, snow scenes, things like that.”
The completion of the mural will roughly coincide with the 10th anniversary of the opening of Sourland Cycles. Gray and then-partner Russ White started the business in November 2014.
At a time when many small retail businesses are struggling, making it to 10 years in little Hopewell Borough with a niche business like bicycles cannot have been easy.
“What I tell people has made this place a success is the people we have working here,” Gray says. “I’ve been able to get some really good people here —good with bicycles, but also good with people. If someone’s a first timer or looking for family or for a first mountain bike, it really carries over, the things we do here to make people feel welcome.”
Key staff include mechanics Tom Cooper and Joanne Gusweiler. Cooper has been with Sourland Cycles since before it opened.
“We’ve had a number of people here who are ex-professional level riders, who come because of Tom Cooper and his great mechanic experience,” Gray says. “Bike people tend to support small shops because the Internet’s not going to fix your bike.”
Other key staff members include the sales team of Tom Mason, David Kossoff, Katie Rex, Alex Robuck and bike ride leaders Carolyn Callan, Rich Armington, Anne Biber and Maria Masi.
Providing service and equipment to women cyclists is a focus of Sourland Cycles.
“I wanted that to be an important part of who were are, treating women’s cyclists just as important, if not more important. “To make them comfortable in an environment that for too long has been sexist. One of our mechanics is a woman, two of our best sales folks are women. Another has gone on to become one of our ride leaders,” Gray says. “It’s really been important to me to have women working here. You see other shops where you go and you just talk to a bunch of boys who happen to love bikes. It doesn’t mean you get best retail experience.”
Gray says that Sourland Cycles will host a reception on Sunday March 3 at noon to formally unveil the mural. Artist Myles Cavanaugh will be in attendance.
Gray also said that Sourland Cycles would be doing events throughout the year on the occasion of the bike shop’s 10 years in business. He anticipates doing raffles and giveaways on a regular basis throughout the year. “We’ll definitely be giving away a couple of bikes at least by the end of the season,” he says.
Artist Myles Cavanaugh and bike shop owner Mike Gray in front of the new mural Cavanaugh’s painted in the shop on East Broad Street in Hopewell Borough. (Photo courtesy of Sourland Cycles.),
