After nearly 40 years, Sixth Street Specials prepares for its final ride in the East Village

Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy 

After nearly 40 years in business, Sixth Street Specials is closing and moving on from the East Village.

Owner Hugh Mackie tells me that the specialty motorcycle repair shop, which opened in 1986, will shutter by June 15 here on Sixth Street between Avenue C and Avenue D.

"In September, the landlord notified us the building had been sold, and we had to be out by January," Mackie says. "Then that deal fell through." 

A new for-sale sign arrived this past Friday and now hangs on the building. Mackie says the landlord has been great. He started working with the father and now his son, and they "have come to an agreement to be out of the space by June 15. The landlord's been 100% cool with me." 

The shop is located in the building, which also serves as a living and working space for Mackie and his family. Mackie, his wife, and their son will move to an apartment they found in Sunnyside, Queens. The rest of the building is now vacant.

The sale also prompted Mackie to retire, with longtime shop manager Joshua Mackenzie taking over the business and moving it elsewhere.

"Josh came here to relieve me from running the shop floor and has been managing it since COVID began," Mackie says. 

Mackenzie worked at Sixth Street Specials from 1997 to 2002 and returned in March 2020. He says he's looking for a space to move the business, maybe in New Rochelle or Red Hook, the two primary locations he's scoping out.

During the transition, he plans to keep the name Sixth Street Specials but says he might eventually change it. 

And Mackie? 

"Hugh will always have a bench," Mackenzie says. "It will be my shop, but he'll always have access."

Mackenzie plans to "stay on course with what we do, fixing old Triumphs," but he hopes the new location can fill a void for Upstate New York and New England, where there is a dearth of mechanics for these old bikes. 

Mackie adds, "I hope we can spread the word and that the Triumph community will still come out and get work done." 

I asked Mackie why he didn't want to continue in a new location. 

"I've done this since I was young. God knows how we managed these years, with shop fires, 9/11, Hurricane Sandy — endless shit. I'm 66 years old, I can't imagine doing this for another 30 years," he says. "We're the last bike shop down here. Independent businesses get squeezed too hard! The old days of dumping tires are over. The days of junkies dumping gas are over. I can't run a business with no money, and all of my peers have moved on. Now, it's just millennials with new bikes. This place has always made money, one way or another we survived. Winters sucked, and the summers were too busy. But I can't keep doing it anymore."

And how does he feel about semi-retirement? 

"Remember, it was a good thing. It's not a bad thing. When we started here, it was a dump. A drug den and a notorious tent city, heroin everywhere, people lined up to buy," Mackie says. "When I showed up, it meant safety; a business was now open on the street. I'm not looking for a bunch of nostalgia, just looking to get on with the next stage of my life."

Mackie says his cell number hasn't changed if you know him, although he admits he's planning on ignoring it as much as possible. He reminds me he's "old school, no website." 

I became friends with Mackie after our previous EVG interview in 2019 when I crawled down the motorcycle ramp into the basement because I didn't realize there was an upstairs office. There, Mackie was sipping a cup of tea. (However, he admits he recently switched to coffee.)

 I'll miss being able to drop by and hang out for a spell and talk about the neighborhood. On sunny days, we'd sit on the stoop and watch his son play with his toy cars or just people-watch. So, personally, I wish Hugh well with his next chapter, but selfishly, I will miss having him and the shop close by.

The shop's new number is (917) 284-4181. The shop's previous Instagram account will remain active.

Weekend parting shots

Photos by Stacie Joy 

Congratulations to Daniel Weiss on the release of his first photo book, "Pay Phone" (Smog Press). 

Shot between 2008-2020, the book chronicles the last days of the public telephone in NYC. 

On Friday evening, Sixth Street Specials hosted a book signing party...

A revisit to Sixth Street Specials

[Photo by Stacie Joy]

The New York Times today features Hugh Mackie and Sixth Street Specials, his motorcycle shop on Sixth Street near Avenue C.

Excerpt!

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.

And...

There used to be more places like this in Manhattan: four or five in the East Village, Mr. Mackie guessed, and maybe a dozen more farther downtown. Now they’re in North Brooklyn. Some resemble fashion boutiques, tailored to the tastes and money of upwardly mobile guys who want the glamour but not the grease.

You can read the full piece, with nice black-and-white pics by Daniel Weiss, here.

Meanwhile, you can revisit Stacie Joy's photo essay and interview with Mackie for EVG back in March. You can find the post at this link.

Monday's parting shots

Spotted on the door at Sixth Street Specials on Sixth Street east of Avenue C... a note about a free kitten (motorcycle kitten?) to a good home ...



Thanks to EVG reader Phil Brown for the photos.

And read our feature on Sixth Street Specials at this link.

A visit to Sixth Street Specials

Interview and photos by Stacie Joy

I’m crawling through a hole in the ground to meet Hugh Mackie, owner of Sixth Street Specials motorcycle repair shop. It’s the steep ramp underground where people bring their cycles to be diagnosed and repaired here at 703 E. Sixth St. between Avenue C and Avenue D.



Apparently there is an upstairs shop, a place that doesn’t require hunkering my way down through an unlighted tunnel beyond two wooden doors (all while wearing a lot of camera equipment) but I missed the memo.

Downstairs the space is huge — it runs a reported 100 feet back — and it’s filled with cycles, parts, neatly stacked organized tools and many empty or nearly empty cups of tea. Mackie drinks a lot of tea.











Upstairs the shop is filled with more bikes, parts and tools, as well as artwork (including a signed Salvador Dali and pieces from one of Mackie’s kids) and mementos of Mackie’s many years racing and of his friends, especially Indian Larry. The place is filled with memories and stories, and Mackie is an excellent storyteller.





He introduces me to mechanic Fumihisa Matsueda, who is busy at work crouched by an Italian Laverda, lit with a portable task work lamp and a small space heater.



Mackie answers some questions I had about photos of my grandfather’s custom bikes from the 1930s, and casually continues the interview even after being stabbed in the finger by an engine part. He calmly wraps the bleeding digit with some electrical tape and tells me a bit about his history on Sixth Street.

How long have you been here?

The shop opened here in 1986, and I moved into the building [Mackie lives upstairs with his wife] in 1998. This building used to be a nail factory back in the day.

What made you choose the East Village as your shop’s home?

I’ve lived in the neighborhood since 1981. The location was abandoned empty lots back then, and squats, and the rent was good. In SoHo, lofts were filling up and artists were looking to the East Village. Typical East Village history.

We were the first business on the block that wasn’t drugs or prostitution back then. Artist Charles Keller lived on the third floor of this building and my friend Edgar lived in a blue van outside. We used to run an electrical cord to him in the winter so he could keep warm.

Do you still have customers from the early days on Sixth Street? What’s your typical customer like these days?

Very few from the old days are left. Sadly, they don’t live here anymore. The customer base changed. Still there are folks who ride vintage bikes all over the East Coast. They send their bikes here to be repaired. We make rent servicing new Triumphs. The company closed in the 1980s and revamped in the 1990s and is making new Bonneville models.

In Manhattan, if you need to service a bike you can’t do it yourself and can’t do it on the street. There are no more bike shops! Very few automotive places left at all. We’re one of the last shops. We also service older bikes to make our bread and butter. Millennials are the ones buying these new bikes. Those old enough to have graduated college and afford a bike — that helps keep our doors open.





How have you been able to stay in that space for so long with rents being what they are and buildings being sold left and right?

We have a good relationship with the landlord. It used to be back here you don’t ask for anything and the landlord doesn’t provide anything, you fend for yourself. Things are different now. Rent has gone up in quantum leaps. The landlord’s sons have taken over.

This building used to have four tenants, one on each floor. Now one is an Airbnb: things are subdivided and sublet, people taking in more roommates. When a tenant leaves or is forced out, the new tenant has to pay much more and then brings in other people to share the burden of cost. The building is overwhelmed now. Too many people flushing Bounty down the toilet pipes. Landlord profiteers and rent goes up.

As the neighborhood gets more and more gentrified, more agencies issues tickets and fines for repairs that are needed. This building has no super and I am on the ground floor so I end up having to patch things and fix those citations.



Any concerns about the shop’s long-term future?

Yes, absolutely! The last 10 years have been possible only due to the economic downturn/financial crisis in 2008. We’ve received a stay of execution.

What are your thoughts on the East Village of 2019?

It’s unrelated to what it was historically. Actually, that’s not the truth. It was built for immigrants. New people occupying everything. My own kids can’t afford to live here now.





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Sixth Street Specials doesn't have a website or social media. If you want to know more about the shop, as Mackie tells me, just pick up the phone and call. “It’s a business, I answer the phone all the time!”