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A variety of historical bicycles are exhibited in the front window displays of the Cycling Museum of Minnesota in the St. Paul skyways on Nov. 4, 2025. (Jared Kaufman \/ Pioneer Press)<\/p>\nWhen Juston Anderson was growing up, the bus stop was right in front of his house. Kids from around the neighborhood would ride their bikes over, and while they waited for the bus, they\u2019d tinker with the mechanics.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I learned how to ride a bike, it didn\u2019t take me long to figure out that having a bike equals freedom,\u201d Anderson said. \u201cLater, I was going to school in Winona and I thought, when I graduate and get a job, I\u2019m going to buy a historical bike. And then it just never stopped.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anderson amassed a significant enough personal collection that, in 2013, he exhibited some of his antique bikes at the State Fair. It caught the attention of the owners of Recovery Bike Shop in Minneapolis, who invited him to bring the exhibit to the second floor of their shop. Early the next year, the nonprofit Cycling Museum of Minnesota was officially born.<\/p>\n
After a couple moves throughout the years, the museum opened an exhibition space in the St. Paul skyways, within Securian Financial\u2019s 401 Building, with support from the Downtown Alliance\u2019s Grow Downtown program. Because the museum is still a small, volunteer-run operation, the skyway exhibition space is currently open by appointment only.<\/p>\n
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A variety of historical bicycles are exhibited in the front window displays of the Cycling Museum of Minnesota in the St. Paul skyways on Nov. 4, 2025. (Jared Kaufman \/ Pioneer Press)<\/p>\n
Today, the museum\u2019s collection consists of more than 100 bicycles, including significant designs from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection also places a particular emphasis on Minnesota-made bikes and cycling artifacts, including vintage bike license plates and race medals.<\/p>\n
Walking through the museum\u2019s collection with Anderson, both his love of bicycles and his encyclopedic knowledge of cycling history immediately become clear.<\/p>\n
The oldest bicycles in the collection are high-wheel bikes, sometimes called penny-farthings, from the 1880s. These bikes have what, to modern riders, appears to be a comically large front wheel, but Anderson explained its practical purpose: Because modern gear-and-chain drivetrain systems had not yet been invented, a larger wheel circumference meant more distance traveled with one pump of the pedal.<\/p>\n
However, because of the way the seat was attached directly over the large wheel, it was unsettingly easy to accidentally take a \u201cheader,\u201d or spin over the large front wheel and smash into the ground head-first, Anderson said. So when the modern bicycle design came around \u2014 with two equally sized wheels and a seat situated between them \u2014 it was aptly called a \u201csafety bicycle.\u201d<\/p>\n
From there, he explained, various bells and whistles were added, literally and figuratively. Real noise-making devices were a crucial safety feature, so bikes would not spook nearby horses. Other add-ons that can be seen on bikes in the museum\u2019s collection include acetylene gas headlamps, map cases, tool-carrying attachments and, for ladies\u2019 bicycles, a skirt guard so the fabric would not become tangled in the wheel spokes.<\/p>\n
The museum\u2019s ethos, Anderson said, is preservation, not restoration. To illustrate this point, he noted some very faint ornate stenciled decoration along the frame of a bike from the early 20th century.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you strip it down, take off all the paint, you are getting rid of a lot of the history of the bike,\u201d he said. \u201cAny type of corrosion, we want to get that stopped. But if we were to restore this bike and repaint it, you would lose the original stenciling. I\u2019m not into restoring bikes, because it just eliminates all the history that the bike had.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery bike tells a story as it is,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n