Nested approximately a mile up Mount Pleasant Road — ‘Mount Unpleasant’ as the locals call it — sits a white farmhouse with a long gravel driveway where the sun sets over a farm field. From 6 to 8 p.m. every weekday, this house and its two garages are abuzz with sounds of dogs barking, chickens clucking and, most importantly, chatter about biking.
Glenn Swan, a 73-year-old former sponsored cyclist who spends his working hours as a research support specialist in Cornell’s R.F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is the main reason for the chatter, as he runs Swan Cycles out of his garage. The bike shop doesn’t have a website and is advertised solely through word-of-mouth — an intentional choice, he told The Sun.
“I’m not focused on earning massive amounts of money,” he said. “I want people to be able to trust me, and I give them a lot of trust. And people live up to it.”
Swan first opened the shop in 1979 after biking across the United States. It started as “$300 worth of bicycle parts in a cardboard box,” and its mission was exclusively geared toward building custom, high-end race bike frames and stocking the best available components.
This was congruent with his budding career in the Union Cycliste Internationale World Masters Cycling games, where he said he competed across various continents including Europe, Australia and Canada, winning multiple medals including a hill climb in Austria.
“We used to be the masters of pain,” he said, describing how he and an elite group of about six riders would stay in constant competition across events.
Since having a daughter in 2008 and stopping racing in 2010, his business model shifted to become “much more family-oriented,” and “much more recreationally-oriented,” he said.
“If I get more people riding and happy, that's a success,” he said.
Because Swan makes most of his living at Cornell’s machine shop, profit comes secondary to him.
Much of his work includes explaining how to fix problems that arise, sometimes free of cost or at reduced prices if the problem doesn’t take long to solve. Building relationships is his main focus, though, because “when [people run into] a real problem, I know [they will] bring it to me,” he told The Sun.
Swan prides himself on the uniqueness of his store, calling it the “Swan Cycles Experience.”
Because Swan can only tend to one customer at a time, people end up socializing and enjoying the scenery at his house while waiting to be helped. He explained that oftentimes children end up fishing at his pond or playing with chickens while their parents shop.
People also walk their dogs to his house, or even stop by to play with his two “mostly” Labrador retrievers, Blackie and Flash, named by his daughter when she was nine years old, according to Swan. The pair were litter mates since birth and were adopted from a pound.
He recalled one Ithaca College student who wanted to make a video about his shop for a class project and ended up helping him transport chickens — and briefly “chasing a chicken around the woods in the dark” — from a neighbor’s house back home.
“That was a very eye-opening experience for her — which isn't usually what you find when you go to a bike shop,” he said.
He told The Sun he feels like a “caretaker” for his property, which features over 100 acres of woods and trails used by cyclists and Cornell Nordic Ski Racing at Cornell in the winter.
“That’s just as important to me as business or as my job at Cornell. … I know all of my trees,” he said. “The whole thing is a lifestyle.”
Although Swan is the only current employee, he previously employed workers, many who went on to achieve successful careers in the cycling industry or in engineering. He explained how one of his previous employees worked for Cannondale, designing bicycles for European professionals.
Swan told the story of another past employee who designs medical devices and sent him a device typically used to help pull out blood clots in the heart through a non-invasive tube — which Swan used to pull bike cables through his frames.
Outside of just working at his store, Swan has helped organize community bike rides since the 1980s, including the Hollenbeck’s Spring Classic, Tuesday Night Races and the Swandrome Cyclocross Race, which is “quite possibly the longest continuously running cyclocross race in the US,” according to the Finger Lakes Cycling Club’s website and Swan himself.
He explained that his “major goal” is to give back to the community that supported him as a racer.
“Whether it was sponsors in my bike racing, or whether it's all the volunteers that have made events possible, I feel as though the major goal of Swan Cycles is supporting cycling and supporting the Ithaca community,” he said.
Looking to the future, Swan hopes to keep his shop going “for a whole lot more years,” and continue working at Cornell as well.
“I may be old enough to have retired a while ago, but I have too much fun at what I do,” he said. “It would be tough for somebody else to buy the business because so much of the business is my relationship with my customers — it's not just a bunch of bike parts that you can sell.”
Everett Chambala is an assistant news editor for the 144th board. He is working as the primary summer reporter for The Cornell Daily Sun through The Sun’s summer fellowship program.
Everett Chambala is a member of the Class of 2027 in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He is an assistant news editor for the 144th Editorial Board and can be reached at echambala@cornellsun.com.
