Detroit Bikes

When 99% of bicycles sold in America are imported from Asia, building them in Detroit is almost a political act — which is sort of the point. Zak Pashak, a Canadian who’d run a music festival in Calgary, felt a family pull to Detroit (his ancestors came through five generations back), moved here in 2011, bought a 50,000-square-foot building for $170,000, and set out to make “the prototypical American bicycle that people would be proud to ride.”

Detroit Bikes welds its own steel frames in that west-side factory, turning out clean, classic commuter bikes like the B-Type — plus custom runs for hotels, breweries, and brands. It hasn’t been an easy business (American manufacturing rarely is), but the bikes are real, the frames are Detroit-built, and the idealism is intact. A genuinely made-in-Detroit machine, in the city that put the world on wheels.