SIXTH STREET SPECIALS
A Meriden Triumph is still the bike to have on the streets of New York, according to ex-pat Hugh Mackie who runs a workshop for British classics in downtown Manhattan
The best place to go in New York to get your Brit classic sorted
Hugh Mackie and his Sixth Street Specials motorcycle shop have been an oasis for downtown Manhattan motorcycle culture for close to 30 years. Originally from Scotland, Mackie opened his shop during the 1980s at Ave C and E 6th Street in the East Village, when the streets were drug-infested and dangerous.
At that time in the city, the raspy trademark sounds of temperamental parallel-twin Triumphs, BSAS and Nortons were rare – few people had the knowledge or inspiration to work with the bikes. Mackie changed that, and forever changed motorcycle life in New York City. Many credit Hugh and his assistant Fumi Matsueda’s friendly open-door policy and wrenching skills with cultivating a Ton-up Brit bike café racer movement in downtown Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
From its first days, Mackie’s shop has split the difference between a drop-in artist’s atelier and straightforward mechanic’s workshop. Half a dozen Brit bikes are parked out the front; inside the shop, above and behind the workbenches, expressive oil paintings on the walls and ceiling remind everyone about the freewheeling Bohemian downtown vibe of the past.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, as gentrification muscled in, downtown life started to shift away from low rents, affordable drinking hangouts and police who turned a blind eye to bike parking restrictions. Today, the easy-living East Village days are gone. Now, Mackie has to navigate around an unfriendly mixture of challenges that threaten not only his livelihood, but the nonconformist creative spirit of his neighbourhood.
“I got to New York in July of ’81,” Hugh reflected. “The first three weeks I spent at my girlfriend’s sister’s apartment on East 56th street, but the smell got bad so it was time to go. I landed in the East Village. It was an amazing place. I bought a 500 Yamaha and had it for a
few months. The guy who lived next door had a Triumph. To me that was the most amazing bike I’d ever seen. He gave me a ride on it one day and that was it – ‘OK, now I want a Triumph’...”
Hugh’s first Brit bike was a BSA, but he kept blowing up the motor. He sourced other engines but got tired of constantly fixing up his Beeza, so finally bought a Triumph basket case to try something different. He built the bike from the ground up and learned how to maintain it. “That started the whole interest in working on them,” he says. “Funny thing is, that first-ever Triumph I rode... it’s now my bike.”
These days, Hugh races flat track, and even there he applies the principle of keeping things simple when it comes to building his bike. “I was 45 when I started racing and it gave me a whole new interest in the Triumph thing,” he explains. “I race a 1970 Tiger, which is pretty much a stock bike. There’s a couple of things that have been changed on it, but it’s still running a single carb. It does everything I could possibly need.”
Back in the 1980s, there were very few people riding British motorcycles around New York. The small group
‘THE CLOSER YOU CAN GET YOUR BIKE TO FACTORY SPEC, THE BETTER IT’S GOING TO BE’
of Brit bike owners came together because of the familiarity and, when other bikers saw them about, the group grew. Hugh recalls: “We were also at that young, trendy age. We spent our whole time running around the night club scene. We would pull up on these bikes and we got really well known. If you were into bikes and you saw us running around on these British machines, this influenced people. A lot of people just liked that image of riding a British bike. They’d be standing in line at one of the big downtown clubs like the Palladium and a bunch of hooligans would pull up and park on the sidewalk right at the club door, then walk into the club for free. That was the scene, and I was part of it.”
Hugh currently builds and maintains mostly stock British bikes, but has built some specials with raceprepped motors, too. “Yeah, I’ve ported and gas-flowed heads for people. People love the Triton – the style from the old London Ton-up days. I’ve done one or two of those here. But if you want a good, solid bike built, I can do that for you; I am into that. The closer you can make your bike to original factory spec, the better your bike’s going to be. Original motor, original set-up... the motor is going to last longer. You can put high performance in a Triumph motor, but it makes it more fragile. Most of the time, a stock motor is plenty powerful enough for any kind of riding situation in New York.
“In America, the Triumph was a stepping stone to a
Harley. There was something about the USA back in the 1950s and ’60s when the Brits were introduced. The minute they broke down or had 10,000 miles on them, or the points went, people would just shove them in the back of the garage and buy a Harley. We found out there were thousands of these bikes in people’s garages, so we started buying them and bringing them to the shop to fix them. Of course, tons of them had been chopped.
I found more than 400 of these chopped Brit bikes. Back then, we spent our time shortening the forks, taking off the sissy bars and the king & queen seats. We had to convert them back into stock-looking Triumphs. The whole shop grew out of doing that.
“I have always appreciated the beauty of a motorcycle. I would say that the Triumph engine is the most aesthetically pleasing and beautiful engine ever designed. It’s a balance between function and form – one is a product of the other. The stock 650 Triumph produces 49 horsepower; the 750 puts out about 52. People who are talking about 75, 80, 85 horsepower are either really talented or they’re just lying. But that’s a lot of horsepower in a place like New York City. That’s fast enough, it really is. High performance in a place like New York really makes your bike harder to live with in the city – harder to start, and it won’t idle so good. Highperformance cams, magnetos, all that kind of stuff, it’s really for racing. In terms of New York City streets, the closer you are to stock, the better it’s going to be. “My shop has been here for a while and I think we changed motorcycling in the city,” he says. “Everything is changing now in New York City and particularly downtown. The easy days are gone. But this is how it goes in the Big Apple.”
‘IT USED TO BE THE MINUTE PEOPLE’S TRIUMPHS BROKE DOWN, THEY’D BUY A HARLEY’