Has the Flower Bike Man really made his last bike?
I happened upon him on one of my daily rides, so I asked him.
The Flower Bike Man is not happy.
The bicycles he spends an inordinate amount of time festooning with flowers and leaving on the canal bridges of Amsterdam, which he has done for many years now, always with the message “Love Is the Cure” hand-painted on the bike or spray painted somewhere nearby, have been consistently targeted and destroyed. Tires and seats slashed. Flowers cut. Some of them have been burned.
Somebody, some Grade-A asshole, or group of assholes, has been vandalizing the Flower Bike Man’s beautiful and transcendent works of public art, again and again, for unfathomable but unquestionably evil reasons. Why would someone do something like this?
One evening last week, on a typical ride around the city, after hopping on a random ferry and ending up at NDSM, a graffiti-decorated neighborhood of old shipping warehouses turned into art spaces, I saw the the Flower Bike Man. He was fiddling with one of his bikes on the lawn near Noorderlicht Cafe. I rolled to a stop in the grass, dismounted and said goedenavond.
I’ve spoken to him a few times, but I never expect him to remember me. He talks to a lot of strangers daily in his life as an itinerant city-wide bike decorator. I always smile and wave and say hello when I pass him on the fietspad, which is surprisingly often. Like me, he spends a lot of time cycling around the city. I told him that I read the recent story about him in Het Parool. I asked him how he was dealing with all of the attention to his plight. What can be done to catch these assholes?
The power of the flower
If you’ve been to Amsterdam in the last few years, you’ve surely seen the flower bikes. They’re everywhere. They take you by surprise the first time you wander around a corner and set eyes on one, perched majestically at the top of a scenic canal bridge. You wonder, “Who did this? Why? Where can I see more?”
You have to get a photo. Some of them are undeniably beautiful works of DIY public art, not just because they’re covered in colorful plastic petals, but because they combine many Dutch themes into one very irresistible photo op: bicycles, flowers, canals, bridges, water. These bikes seem right at home here, chained to iron bridge railings. They accentuate the fairytale feeling of Amsterdam. They are beloved, and for good reason. They tickle your heart in just the right way.
Who would want to destroy them? Waarom?
It’s hard to find many logical reasons why someone would hate flower bikes. Is the flower bike phenomenon too popular? Is this manifestation of the Instagram Effect, with everyone jockeying to get the same photo, too emblematic of Amsterdam’s disease of overtourism? Perhaps. The last thing we need is more touristen standing in the middle of the street to get the best shot of a flower bike, but it’s hardly that big of a hassle. I ring my bell every day to warn people out of the streets. If these flower bikes weren’t there, they would be taking a photo of their friend standing in front of the same canal bridge anyway.
Maybe some people don’t like him because he’s not from around these parts. The Flower Bike Man isn’t actually Dutch. He’s an American from Florida named Warren.
Itinerant, irascible, but polite
I think he is almost my age, but he looks older. Then again, I look young and always have, the curse of the baby face that eventually becomes a blessing, until it becomes a curse again later in life, when my cheeks will droop and I will start to look more and more like a Basset hound. I can see my future when comparing photos of me and my dad.
Warren has thick, shoulder length, yellowish-bleached hair that’s slowly taking on various shades of grey. It constantly falls in front of his face or is blown around by the wind, giving him the demeanor of an overgrown, sullen teenager, especially when he slumps his shoulders and shoves his hands deep into his pockets. He looks a bit like a sailor, which I believe he is, with a thick salt-and-pepper beard and sun-weathered skin. But he also has a bit of a punk-rock edge. I bet we don’t have too different of a background in some ways. As a teenager, I bet he skateboarded and got into all kinds of trouble. He rolls his own cigarettes. Maybe other things; I didn’t ask. Or, maybe he’s totally straight edge.
Warren is a sizeable man. His physique and bearing suggest he has spent a lot of time outdoors in his life, perhaps performing manual labor. He may stand out, but he’s not an imposing figure. He’s extremely friendly, if a bit rushed in composing his thoughts and expressing them, tripping over stepstones between ideas and rapidly switching topics. He probably has a lot of stories to tell, and he looks like he’d be happy to sit with you and drink a few beers at a marina bar while telling them. He has deeply tanned skin, which I assume followed him all the way from Florida.
His typical dress is thick brown work overalls speckled with paint, which he wears over a faded black graphic t-shirt; for example a Pink Floyd concert tee. I assume he actually went to that concert, which I myself might have attended as a teenager on the same Pink Floyd tour of the Deep South in the 80s. If you were to describe Warren’s style of fashion, it might resemble a cross between Jeff Bridges’ The Dude and Nick Nolte’s character in the overrated farce Down and Out in Beverly Hills – the unlucky homeless bum named Jerry who attempts to commit suicide in the pool of a wealthy family after his dog dies. (The stranger who comes to town and forever changes the lives of the family who, perhaps unwisely, take him in; it was originally a French play written in 1919 called Boudu sauvé des eaux, which I hope was better than the movie.)
When I rolled up to him at NDSM on my bicycle last week and introduced myself, he practically congratulated me for stopping. He told me that a group of tourists who walked by earlier were clearly curious about his flower bike and probably wanted to ask about it, but unlike me, they didn’t stop. Warren said they seemed afraid to approach him.
I gave his creation a look, an omafiets plastered with pink and red flowers, resting on a kickstand. It was parked in front of a giant red plywood sign in the shape of a circle with the phrase “Love is the Cure” painted in yellow.
“They probably thought I was homeless,” he said.
Warren is not just a guy who’s spent a lot of time outside, he’s also an outsider. He tells his story on a website that someone made for him, and it’s a hard luck story, but one with a touching core of sweetness at its center. He makes these bikes to please the love of his life, his wife Michelle, who suffers from epilepsy, which can severely affect her memory. As he tells it, Warren originally made these bikes and placed them as breadcrumbs to help her find her way home. Some neighbors said, hey, put one of those cool bikes in my yard, too. I’d like to help out. And thus a legend was born.
Warren started making flower bikes nearly 25 years ago in Florida, but he only started publicly displaying them in Amsterdam in 2018, when he moved here from the US, about a year before I moved here. I originally assumed these bicycles had been around for a long time, but it is a relatively recent phenomenon in Amsterdam. Since then, his public profile has grown by leaps and bounds, turning him into a local celebrity.
The scourge of the socials
His work is amplified around the globe via Instagram, but this has ultimately become more of a detriment than a benefit. Whenever he posts a photo of his latest creation, he knows he’s simultaneously putting a pin on the map for the person, or persons, who want to destroy it.
“Everything I post online becomes a target,” he says.
Warren and I used to follow each other back when I posted on Instagram, but then his account got hacked and started posting about cryptocurrency. I mention the hack to him, expressing my sympathies that something he spent so much time growing was taken away from him. He politely says he’ll follow me again on his new account if I want, but I tell him don’t bother because it’s only a matter of time before I delete my account. My reminder of the hack sent him down another rabbit hole of disappointment, with more complaints pouring out about how he’s been targeted and persecuted by flower bike assassins online in other devious ways. He’s got a lot of anger, and it’s completely understandable.
Warren is clearly not the kind of guy who wants to spend all day maintaining influencer status and staring into a screen, but Instagram is still the most efficient way to get his message out. (New bike just dropped!) Unfortunately for Warren, and for many small-time artists and creatives, Instagram, even with its many downsides, is one of the few places in this modern Internet age where they can spread their passion and get their artwork or craftwork or obscure handiwork in front of people’s eyeballs.
I met a lot of people like Warren growing up in the Deep South of the US, creative oddballs who don’t usually have a job and don’t really want one. Some are amateur artists with a very specific vision of a craft they’re obsessed with, even if that’s just playing with wood and paint or building things in the forest. The pay is nonexistent, but it beats punching the clock down at the chicken processing plant.
Although I don’t really know him, I wonder if Warren might be that kind of person. From my experience, those people don’t always fit into society, and in fact, they sometimes find themselves in contentious battles with the world, either inside their own heads or with neighbours who can’t understand why they’re stockpiling all that junk in the backyard.
In our conversation, I also congratulated him on his first official public exhibition. The year prior, he was commissioned to place eleven bicycles on a route throughout Amsterdam West, in my part of the city. It was designed as a walking tour with scannable QR codes, and it got a lot of publicity. I loved it.
“There’s a bad story with that, too,” Warren says. The organizers of the event got all the money, taking in nearly 20K, but they only paid him a pittance of a few thousand euros.
Call in the Marechaussee
Is the destruction of these bicycles plain old vandalism? Or does someone in particular have a beef with Warren in particular? Is it revenge? Misguided jealousy? Does this person hate bikes, flowers, or just Warren?
Can we petition the King of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, to assign the Koninklijke Marechaussee, the Dutch royal special police, to the case, alsjeblieft? I want to see green night-vision footage of these malevolant flowerplowers getting tackled by soldiers descending from roofs on ziplines. I want scuba-diving frogmen to emerge from underwater, grab them by the ankles, and drag them into the canal. Then, we can chain them to the iron railing of a canal bridge with an especially beautiful view, naked, wearing only underwear they’ve woven together with plastic flowers and zip ties. Have them hold a sign that says ‘Love is the Cure’ and encourage touristen to post photos on Instagram. Send a strong message that public art should be off limits to vandalism and graffiti. Doe normaal, assholes!
I’m not the kind of person who gets excited about meeting famous people. In fact, I try to avoid it. I’ve met a few celebrities or otherwise culturally important people in my life, and for the most part they never impress me as anything other than normally flawed human beings, albeit ones with perhaps too much money, power, and attention. But for some reason, I couldn’t resist taking a selfie with the Flower Bike Man, despite the incontrovertible fact that I am terrible at taking selfies. I don’t even know how to hold the camera. Plus, I hate almost all photos of me. And yet, I persisted. There I am, squinting into the setting late-summer sun standing next to the saddest man in Amsterdam. Zeg kaas!
Is love still the cure?
In the past, whenever he’s been interviewed about the destruction of his bikes, the Flower Bike Man has always retorted that he will keep making bikes in defiance of the haters. However, that may have changed. As he told Het Parool the week before our conversation: “I made my last bike in Amsterdam. Love doesn’t win, love fails.”
Warren told me he was planning on putting up one more post on Instagram, after he’d collected some of his bikes and put them in a safe location, which was what he was doing on this late summer’s eve. I thanked him for his time chatting with me and for all of his magnificent work, shaking his hand for some reason; respect, I guess, for a lot of good honest art made with plastic flowers and glue and glitter and time. I told him that I’m as cynical as they come – a real glass almost empty kind of guy – but his flower bikes still melt my heart.
I think Warren’s flower bikes are extremely powerful in their potential to tell a more joyful story about cycling. I want people who don’t cycle and have never even considered doing it in cities to associate bicycles with fun, beauty, freedom, and – most importantly – style. Stand next to one of these flower bikes for ten minutes and watch the reactions of the tourists who walk by. Amsterdam might feel like a chaotic mess of pedestrians and cyclists and trams for these tourists at first, but once they settle into it and slow down and experience the world at a more natural pace of life, they start wondering why it can’t be like this back home where they live. Why can’t they have walkable cities with bicycle lanes?
Flower bikes advertise this vision. Floral and festive bicycles displayed as public art could be one of the best ambassadors for cycling that any city could possibly want. It’s about time we replaced all those Cow Parade statues, anyway. Warren has unleashed an important strategy for spreading joy and making public spaces feel welcoming, and I know this idea will blossom, even if he stops making them. He’s inspired me to hit the thrift stores and outdoor markets and HEMA in search of colorful plastic flowers and zip ties to give my omafietsen some added flower power.
Let a hundred more flower bikes bloom
A few days after our conversation, Warren did, in fact, put up a new Instagram post. He thanked the hundreds of people who sent him messages of goodwill, but he also hinted, yet again, that his time making Flower Bikes might be over. He may even leave Amsterdam. “Flower Bike Man has to go away, but Warren will survive,” he said then, in his possibly last post.
And yet... There has been so much support. Everyone, save for a few miscreants, is rooting for him. There are people who want to help, who will do more than just shake his hand after a quick selfie and ride off into the sunset.
And that’s what’s been happening. The Flower Bike Man was so overwhelmed with private well wishes and pleas to not give up or leave, it encouraged him to post yet again on Instagram and thank everyone. Some people sent money to fix the bikes. He admits that his threat to stop making flower bikes succumbed to his own fading memory of signing a contract for a commission from the Stadsherstel for two bikes in time for the 750th anniversary of the city of Amsterdam, which is next summer. So, he’s on the hook for at least two more bikes. Incidentally, he’s looking for a new place to moor his boat, in case anyone knows a spot. Perhaps he can be persuaded to stay. Perhaps he will continue to make flower bikes.
“Wherever I have been in the city this past month – Noord, Zuid, Oost, or West,” he wrote, “people have approached me to say we love you, don't stop, sometimes only in Nederlands taal. When I hear this from locals, I never want to stop.”
Even if turns out love isn’t the cure, it can be a powerful incentive to keep going.
I cannot believe he’s from Florida omg
Breadcrumbs? for his wife?? Oh my goodness, what good human! People should form posses to watch his creations and publicly shame the jerks who mess with them!