Hugh Mackie owns one of the last motorcycle garages in Manhattan. At 61, he still rides around the five boroughs on his motorcycle, though these days he prefers his bicycle. To love motorcycles is to love some measure of suffering. Hugh Mackie knows this. He has had the smashed collarbone, cracked ribs, cracked shoulder blade and broken thumb to prove it.
“I can tell when the rain is coming,” he said in an interview earlier this year. As the barometer rises, so does the pain from those old injuries.
Like a lot of guys who ride, he lives by intuition: You can’t think your way out of an unexpected pothole or a hairpin turn when riding through New York City. To call Mr. Mackie, 61, a dying breed is probably an exaggeration, but maybe not here. Nestled between Avenues C and D in the East Village of Manhattan, his motorcycle garage, Sixth Street Specials, is among the last in the borough, a vestige of a neighborhood that scarcely resembles its past — and of an iron-horse culture that the city seems determined to throttle.
Photographs by Daniel Weiss, Text by Austin Considine via The New York Times
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