The Pure City Tour: Stop 1, Western Ave.

All right, so you've probably figured it out by now…and if you haven't, you're about to. Our Pure City bikes are all named after some of the most famous streets, roads, and boulevards in the world. Why, you ask? Because that's how they were designed. With influences from all of our favorite cities, streets, and rides, we thought there was no more fitting moniker than the roads themselves.

But more than just a compilation of random streets, each name has a little special significance beyond the obvious. Whether evoking an idea, locale, or style, every model name says something about the city bikes themselves.

So I thought I'd start a little installment looking at the roads that inspired our rides. And what better place to start than the home of it all, Los Angeles, and the namesake of our Western, Western Avenue.

Western Avenue does a pretty great job of summing up LA. It's a road…and we have a lot of those. But more than that, it stretches from Downtown to Santa Monica and touches a ton of the city in between. But the thing that really sets it apart to us is the history. Western Ave sprung out of a barley field in 1895. It took off in the early 1920s and became an icon of style and design, currently home to many of LA's largest museums.

When designing our city bikes, we looked to urban styling from the '20s and '30s to influence the lines and colors of our new bikes. We wanted the new city bikes to embody the same vintage style apparent in many of the buildings that grace Western and the aptly named "Miracle Mile."

It's that same vintage, urban styling that influenced the design of our bikes, from colors and lines, all the way to the logo. In the end, we love Western Ave. Not so much for the road it is (did I mention the potholes?) but for what it represents in the history of the city we love and a style we dig. So thanks, Western. We'll be riding on ya soon, potholes and all!