A few times a week Tim McGuire bikes from the Embarcadero BART station toward his office near the Ferry building. Well, maybe it’s not what most of us think of as an office.
"We call it the island. It's the island between Embarcadero. Um, yeah, just hanging out, waiting for work," Tim says as he leans his bike up against the concrete steps.
It’s where a lot of bike messengers hang out nowadays. Tim shows up in a yellow t-shirt, black denim cutoffs, and a camouflage baseball cap. He’s also missing a couple of teeth — the result of a bike accident unrelated to his job. But it’s what else he’s wearing—and carrying— that suggests he might be a messenger: a large, well-worn messenger bag; a leather holster on his belt for his lock; and a defunct pager.
Of course, Tim also has a bicycle.
"Italian frame set, steel, hot purple. 10-speed road bike, drop bars. Comfortable enough but fast enough and efficient enough to get me where I need to go.”
“Fast, not comfortable."
As we’re sitting at the island, Tim checks his phone and waits for a message from his dispatcher—a buzz signaling the first delivery of the day.
"So I pretty much just stay here until I get a job, go grab it, wait till the boss tells me to go to court. Do it. Come back. It’s all pretty, enclosed, you know? I’m not going all city like some companies are. I kinda wish I was, but I’m old, you know? I gotta save my energy."
Tim turned 40 in March, and he’s been a messenger for just over a decade. He started off delivering flowers on Valentine’s Day in 2014, but quickly switched to what he mostly delivers today: legal documents. His days used to be packed, but lately it’s slow.
“The Superior Court system went to e-filing. It's kind of like the first time the fax machine came around and the internet came, and email came around."
After about two hours of waiting, Tim finally gets a message on his phone from his dispatcher.
"We were going to a US District court. 450 Golden Gate," he tells me.
Tim picks up his coffee with one hand, and his bike with another. A quick sweep of his leg up and over the seat, and he starts cycling down Market Street.
"Yeah my theory is if you’re a bike messenger you can do anything one handed. Usually you have the coffee in one hand."
We capture his ride on a GoPro camera attached to his handlebars. While it does the recording, my job is to keep up with Tim on my own bike.
He dodges some pedestrians and zigs across a trolley track—risky for a cyclist but Tim rides with the experience of someone who seems to anticipate the timing of every light and every movement on the street.
We make a stop at his company’s office downtown: First Legal. It’s an actual office where he grabs a stack of documents for our run to the courthouse. Tim places them in his messenger bag, and hops back on the bike. He doesn’t even pull up Google Maps, or even check his route.
"By the time you're out here for long enough, you hear the name of the client, you know exactly where you can almost feel it in your legs, the amount of time it takes to get there to get the s***, who you're going to talk to, who the security guard is…it just goes in your brain, you know."
We make a right down Minna Street and after about 15 minutes, we’re at the Federal Courthouse.
First stop of the day, done. On our next ride he recognizes a fellow messenger, and shouts an extraordinarily loud ‘whoop’ across the din of Market Street.
"I don’t know, it’s cool. It’s a culture versus like a job. If you see your buddy on a street, put something on his bike, or wave or yell."
Parcels, pamphlets, and punk rock
Messengers used to take up a lot more space downtown. Their regular hangouts included a spot at the corner Sansome and Sutter nicknamed “The Wall” or along the plaza at One Post.
Carla Laser remembers these days well. She’s an unofficial documentarian of bike messenger culture. I visit her in the Lower Haight, where she shares an apartment with a dozen or so vintage Schwinn frames.
She also has a collection of bicycle parts, messenger bags, and hundreds of photos of bike messengers that she started taking in the 90s. Carla is also the current publisher of Cognition—the world’s longest running printed messenger ‘zine.
"And the rule I have is when I hand some to people, or if I give some to people to give them to other people, I told them that they have to say ‘Special Delivery’ when they do it," Carla says.
We sift through old issues of Cognition, and other pamphlets. In them, we find snippets of information that clues us into the history of this community—starting as early as the 19th century. According to one pamphlet, a railway strike halted mail delivery in the Bay Area. So, a bicycle shop owner in Fresno came up with the idea to deliver mail, by bicycle, using a relay system, where riders would cover 30 miles at a time. A decade later, Western Union became one of the first companies to use bicycle messengers to deliver telegraphs.
Other companies quickly caught on. But, during the 1960s and 70s, the messenger industry started to attract artists who wanted to support their creative pursuits with a less traditional form of work. Many formed bands—punk, ska, metal—and put on shows at different haunts, like The Farm, a former venue in Potrero Hill.
As messengers became a larger presence, some got involved in bicycle activism, and pushed for changes to make San Francisco the bicycle-friendly city it is today:
"We have bike racks all over San Francisco. Before that you had to lock your bike to a parking meter or something like that. Most of the original bike San Francisco Bicycle Coalition was comprised of bike messengers."
And messengers saw their share of changes on the streets, and sometimes found themselves in the middle of them. Clashes with police, labor strikes, the rise of cycling advocacy such as Critical Mass. They had a street level view of the rise of technology as the city's economic engine. And messengers had to either figure out their place in this changing world, or move on to other jobs. In fact, Carla says the number of messengers out on the road today might be half of what it was some 20 years ago.
"I think it's probably about 200 to 300. …I mean, that's including the food delivery messengers. I know that it used to be like 500-600 or more. And then you know, and then behind every messenger is the dispatcher, and all the office workers, and they're, you know, as important as the messengers for any of these roles."
But Carla says this doesn’t mean the culture is dying too. Look hard enough, and you’ll see bike messenger culture in the clothes people wear, the bags they carry, and on the bikes they ride.
"You know, they're bike messengers but they are actually so many creative, wonderful people. I mean, some are accountants, some are tattoo artists, some have their own different kinds of companies, some have their own messenger companies, some are, you know, get really famous and are filmmakers. And it just goes on."
A culture of resilience
As Carla spoke about the bike messenger community, who now do everything from food delivery to, believe it or not, mosquito abatement, it took me back to a conversation I had with Tim:
"You know, this job has given me a lot. It's given me contentment. It's given me, livelihood. It's given me exercise…And that’s why I’ve been in the job for 10 years. You go on your little adventures, you might run into somebody, you might meet somebody. … it's like a slice of life everywhere you turn."
We finish both of Tim’s runs, which took a grand total of about 35 minutes. He anticipates he might have it easy the rest of the afternoon.
"I'm just gonna be hanging around, see what dispatch says. Probably have some lunch."
We ride back to the Island together, and when we get there, we see a group of messengers—current and former—who have gathered since we left. This morning, there was almost a sense of loneliness as Tim and I chatted, waiting for his first job. But as I listened to some of the other messengers, it felt different.
Messengers, like Tim, keep this unique profession and culture moving. You can see it on the streets, in Carla’s next issue of Cognition, or in the banter at the island.. A group of riders who thrive on the movement of the continual cadence of the city streets.