Stuart Allen - Form Following Function

Down a tiny road in what’s called The Quiet Corner of Connecticut is the 1760s farmhouse and garage of Stuart Allen. Stuart is a special kind of biker/builder. His collection contains one-offs, factory racers, and privateer specials, bikes you’re not likely to see anywhere else. These are not pretty boy customs. They are racers, made only to go fast without breaking. All around the garage are motors that can run wide open for an hour or two, frames and hardware thick enough to survive the pounding. These are bikes purpose-built, brutally efficient and beautiful in their own special way.

I’ve known Stuart since 1975 when we met in New York while working on a movie called Wolfen. I was there to teach someone in New York how to keep a then brand-new invention called the Louma Crane alive and show them how to use it. The Louma carried a movie camera at the end of a long slender arm and panned and tilted it remotely. It combined sophisticated mechanics, servo motor electronics and video systems in brand new ways and movie crews were just coming to grips with all the new things they would have to learn to make it work. Naturally another biker would be the right guy to learn this thing and keep it together.

Over the next few months, we worked together on the movie and I showed him everything I knew about the crane and we shared our love of motorcycles. And when it was over, I headed back to LA, but we stayed friends forever.

When we first met Stuart was riding a 1969 BMW R60/2, and he still has it, but over the years he’s collected more bikes, mainly BSA singles but all of them racers of one kind or another. When I asked him how he got into this he told me that he started out building cars but when he moved to the city he got into bikes “because I could keep them in my loft and I didn’t have to crawl under them.” And why race bikes?  “I like race bikes because they only have one purpose, they’re perfect examples of form following function. Race bikes are not about show, they’re about go.” Many of his bikes are privateer racing machines, bikes built on a budget by guys with more passion than money, “A lot of these bikes were built and rebuilt in the backs of pickup trucks between races. They weren’t supposed to be pretty, only to go fast.”

So almost fifty years have gone by since we first met and when we see each other it’s usually in LA or NY. Whenever we talk though, I hear about this mythical garage with all his bikes in it. This summer my long suffering not-biker wife Darcy and planned to visit Cape Cod then head down to New York; looking at a map I saw we could get to Stuart’s Connecticut place on the way. The only problem –  our schedule meant we had just an hour to see the bikes and visit.

When we got there, I grabbed my camera and shot pictures while we talked. Stuart is an opinionated guy with his opinions backed up by a lifetime of knowledge. He’s pithy too and I’ve quoted him a lot here to give you some of the flavor. Walking through the garage with him as he tells you the what and why of these bikes is a special treat.

The threat of rain meant leaving most of the bikes inside and the hour time limit meant most of the collection remained unseen for now.  So here are the first few glimpses of a place filled with wonderful machinery and the guy who keeps it all alive.