Bike Kitchen Rescues CELLspace

A mural commissioned by The Bike Kitchen outside of CELLspace, depicting the everyday environs of The Bike Kitchen.

Angel from The Bike Kitchen hit us up in the comments letting us know that they've stepped up to save CELLspace:

Angel from the Bike Kitchen here. I just wanted to let folks know that the Bike Kitchen is going to be loaning (interest free) CELLspace $13,000 to help them keep their doors open. Back when the Bike Kitchen started, CELLspace gave us a rent-free space for about two years at the Mission Village Market (remember that place? It was the weekend flea market and warehouse/art space at 18th & Alabama. It's been replaced by mixed income apartments and is the Bike Kitchen's new home too). Anyway, we're pretty frugal and have been able to save up some cash and are stoked to be able to give back to this org which helped us get our feet. CELLspace has a pretty bright future in the Mission - it's a shame that this bureaucratic hiccup could almost bring an org like this down.

The bureaucratic hiccup, as you might recall, was the city's Planning Department (boo, hiss!) forcing them to do a whole bunch of renovations before they could reopen their doors.  Renovations that forced the space to raise $25,000 by the end of January or be faced with shutting down.  Looks like they weren't set to quite hit their goal by the end of the month, but the Mission community stepped up just in the nick of time.  Now we can look forward to rollerdisco New Years parties and magical monkey murals for years to come.

Comments (1)

Good for them. Our neighborhood group actually originally made the arrangements for the Mission Village Market operated by CellSpace.

It was a hot mess.

But we always like the Bike Kitchen and worked with the developer to get them included in the project where they now reside.

They have been pretty good neighbors. No complaints.

CellSpace on the other hand still languishes in a hybrid of great and gross, and desperately needs to be run by people whose idea of a community space extends beyond “hey, its burning man 24/7/365!”

This isn’t the *high* desert.

We have all reached out to save CellSpace over and over, and they lurch from one crisis to the next. Hopefully this will be their last.