E-Mail This Article to a Friend Urban cowboys (continued)

Boston riders share such provocativeness with other countercultural communities. But it’s also a specific response to what many see as a concentrated effort by the rest of the city to get them off their bikes and into a suit and tie. "It’s extremely political, very adversarial," says Lucas Brunelle, 33, an urban-cycling cinematographer and former courier. "The mayor doesn’t like us, the chamber of commerce doesn’t like us, the city council doesn’t like us — it goes on and on."

In fact, a crackdown on couriers in Boston was initiated by the mayor’s office and the Boston Police Department in 1997, after William Spring, a Boston School Committee member, was struck by a bike messenger while walking in the city. He spent several months in a coma before recovering. At that time, Carmen Durso, a local attorney who’d also been hit by a courier, told the Boston Globe, "There is almost no one who doesn’t have a story about couriers. [The] messenger [who hit me] said to me, ‘If I was going faster, I would have really hurt you.’ ... They have no concern." The action by city officials was quick and wide-reaching: identification and active tracking of messengers was stepped up, and everyone was on the watch for out-of-control urban cyclists. (In Boston, couriers are tracked through a licensing division that requires them to display a plate with an ID number at all times.) But since that first crackdown, one officer says she’s witnessed a slackening, with fewer identification plates displayed and fewer active pursuits by the BPD.

"It’s safe to say that without a motorcycle, we’re not going to catch these guys," says another officer, who frequently works around the Mass Ave area. "They’re in shape, they’re fast. Sure, we get complaints — about riding the wrong way on downtown streets, all that — but it’s tough to get a hold on them in general. A lot aren’t messengers." And if the riders in question aren’t couriers, he explains, then tracking them becomes more difficult.

According to John Boyle, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department, no arrests related to the "underground" racing scene have been made. "Of course this sort of thing, when it goes on, is a big concern," he says. "But if [the racing] is happening, it hasn’t been brought to our attention. Yet."

EVEN WITHOUT police interference, interest in the urban bike scene was waning as recently as a few years ago. With riders retiring and enthusiasm dwindling, many began sounding "Taps" for city cycling. Counterintuitively, what might save this anarchic culture from extinction may be organization. Which, it turns out, Boston’s urban cyclists have in spades.

One weekend last month, Alex Whitmore, 27, jumped the Fung Wah bus from Chinatown to catch Monster Track 2005, an "alley cat" road race through lower Manhattan. Long part of NYC’s gritty "fuck the police" courier ethic, alley cats are illegal rides in which urban cyclists race from point to point, toting beers and dodging traffic, generally at an ungodly hour. Until fairly recently, they were also strictly a New York thing: Boston, with its relatively clean streets and puritan ethic, had always seemed a bad fit for the camo-shorts-clad, track-bike crowd. But with the persistence of people like Whitmore and Roth, the Boston urban-race scene has been undergoing something of a renaissance.

"Alex called me [after Monster Track] and said, ‘I’m having a party next week, do you want to come?’ " friend and fellow organizer Scott Mullen recalls. "And I said sure. Then he said, ‘And I want to have a bike race afterwards.’ "

Ten days later, at 1 a.m. on a cold March night, 36 racers pedaled their bikes toward a slow start in Davis Square, Schlitz cans in hand. More than 100 revelers, many of them drunk, looked on. The Midnight Crit had begun.

The course — a race format called a criterium, with short, fast laps — wound through Davis Square. There was beer and whisky where the Gatorade should have been, and, according to Whitmore, a pair of Somerville cops who wanted to know if "this kind of thing happens every week." (It doesn’t.)

In the end, the Crit, which was publicized by fliers only 10 days in advance, was nothing more or less than fast, liquored-up, flat-out urban racing. And events like it may be moving — wipeout by wipeout, illegal ride by illegal ride — toward a bigger and more active underground cycling culture in Boston.

"Things are expanding," Roth says. "There was a period when no one was really doing anything in Boston, but things like [these races] are changing that. There are young kids out there who are really into riding fast, really getting people out on their bikes."

But will Boston ever have a shot at competing with the larger, louder Manhattan courier culture? "People appreciate messengers a lot more in New York than they do here," Brunelle says. "People in general in New York, no matter who they are or what they’re doing, are more open-minded and more accepting of things that are different. Going through lights and stuff — great. A lot of people are very accepting of that in New York. It’s not nearly as political as it is here in Boston."

"In Boston, everyone hates urban cyclists downtown — it’s an unspoken war, waiting to be resolved," agrees Whitmore, a former messenger and self-employed chocolate maker from Somerville. "In New York, races are promoting awareness. Here, we might be a little behind."

Brendt Barbur, who directs the successful Bicycle Film Festival, which advances favorable images of bicycling as part of a developing alternative culture, had originally considered making Boston the host city for this year’s event. Ultimately, Barbur chose New York to host the fourth annual festival, which took place last week; he hints that the decision was more about pragmatism than favoritism.

"The difference between Boston and New York is just density of the traffic and the city itself as a backdrop," Barbur says. "I can relate Boston to being similar to San Francisco, and just the intensity of that city. But there’s a lot more riders in New York than San Fran or Boston. The percentage difference between urban riding populations is huge."