On December 4th, early Sunday morning, CBS News aired a segment by correspondent Susan Spencer documenting on video, her attempt to learn to ride a unicycle. She enlisted the assistance of Lisa Polinari alias The Unicycle Lady to aide in her endeavor to learn the basics of learning to ride. Check i t out.

The New York Unicycle  encourages and assists individuals to learn how to ride unicycle  regardless of age or gender.  The diversity of those that have over the year attended our meetings in terms of age, gender nationality, ethnicity and cultural background is astounding.  Meeting twice per month all year round, you have ample opportunity to come out and learn to ride.

For more than 40 years the King Charles Troupe has been successfully performing on unicycles  for audiences throughout the globe. There is a video currently being  put together documenting their  44 year history. The video will illustrate the King Charles Troupe’s journey from their humble beginnings in the borough of the Bronx, New York City to their travels throughout the United States as well as 14  countries throughout the world. They have truly been global ambassadors for unicycling that have inspired several generations to learn to ride the unicycle. Check out the documentary trailer.

A new up coming video soon to be release on DVD  called Unicycling is not a crime features 36 different unicycle riders of 12 nationalities.  Parts of this video was recorded in 1o different countries. Two NYUC members can be spotted at the beginning of this video trailer.

The second annual three day New York City Unicycle Festival took place over the Labor Day weekend. This years festival organized and produced by by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus turned out to be a well attended success. The festival began with a contingent of 57 unicyclist with unicycles of various sizes and colors, including one made up to look like a sea horse, making the trek over the Brooklyn Bridge. The day was officially proclaimed by Brooklyn’s Borough President, Marty Markowitz as “Brooklyn Unicycle Day”.

About 40 or so riders continued on riding through Brooklyn briefly stopping at Grand Army Plaza and the south end of Prospect Park finally ending up in Coney Island where we met up with participants that decided to get there via other forms of transportation. We had two adventurous 11 year old riders that traveled the entire 13 mile distance from the Manhattan side of the bridge to Coney Island on their unicycles. These two young men actually out paced many of the more experienced unicyclist throughout the ride. Many of the out paced rides were riding on wheels larger than the 20″ and 24″ size wheels on their respective unicycles of the young riders.

Photo courtesy of Norman Blake

At Coney Island after hanging out at Nathan’s Famous, riders were rewarded with a ride on Deno’s Wonder Wheel followed by participation in a unicycle skills demonstration being accompanied by music on the boardwalk. The first day of the unicycle festival was capped off with an incredible fireworks display out over the water.

Day two of the festival that took place on  Governors Island, was chock full of activities. With unicycle tutorials, unicycle hockey, unicycle races and, skill demonstrations there was constant activity throughout the festival area of the island the entire day. Many tried out the outstanding Hell on Wheel unicycle trials course. The demonstrations featured four year old unicycle rider Ziggy Cohen as well as Kyle Petersen (Brooklyn Juggler) and Davd Cox performing comedic juggling acts.

Through out the day there were more than 300 participants with more than 160 unicycles. There were vendors on hand including Unicycle.com and Dubé Juggling Equipment and others. Adam and Renie Cohen of Just One Wheel were directing the tutorial efforts for those that wanted to learn or hone their skills on the unicycle. DJ Sky kept the crowd entertained with music selections throughout the day.

The highlight of the day was the unicycle basketball game between Puerto Rico All Star unicycle basketball team and the King Charles Troupe. It was a competitive, hard fought basketball game.  King Charles Troupe trailed early. However, as they adjusted to the international rules of unicycle basketball, they climbed back in the game only to be edged out in the end by the Puerto Rico All Stars by a single point 37-36.

The King Charles Troupe put on excellent performance of unicycle team based skills such as basketball handling and  jumping double dutch.

All available unicyclist lined up and mounted their unicycles in an effort to break a world record of unicyclist mounted and continuously linked. Unfortunately there were not enough participants present to break the world record of 251 unicyclist. Though, this effort was not wasted by the 155 participating unicyclist who set a new New York State record of linked unicyclist.

For the third and final day of this year’s festival unicycle activities moved up to Harlem, USA. This is the regular meeting venue of the New York Unicycle club. About 65 unicyclist gathered for a full afternoon of just hanging out trying different and unique unicycles, doing skill demonstrations, practicing skills and unicycle networking.

Throughout the three days I snapped a nice collection of photographs that can be found on the NYUC Flickr site. Photographs of days one and two can be viewed in this photo album slideshow titled: 2011 Uni Fest, Day 1&2. Photographs from the third and final day of the festival can be found in this photo album slideshow titled 2011 UniFest Sunday.

This years festival was such a blast. There is a lot of confidence that this event will continue to grow in the future. There were many who were unable make it to this year’s event including many that had attended the first NYC unicycle festival.

The 2011 New York City Unicycle Festival received some positive press both before and during the event. The photo above comes from an August 26th article in The Brooklyn Paper written by Meridith Deliso entitled Get rollin’! Unicycle Fest returns on Sept.2 The article briefly describes the 2011 festival as it was about to happen. The same article without the photo appeared in the Courier Life’s Brooklyn Daily.

This second image comes from the The Wall Street Journal in an September 3rd article entitled For One, and for All written by V. L. Hendrickson. This is a more comprehensive article about the 3 day event with quotes from Keith Nelson of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, David Stone founder of the New York Unicycle Club and, Kyle Peterson alias The Brooklyn Juggler who is best known for fighting against the City of New York for being ticketed for legally riding his unicycle.

This image is of a young lady, Emily Season, who has tricked her unicycle out to look like a seahorse, comes from an extensive article published on September 6 on ESPN Page 2 entitled: Unicycles make mark in New York City. This article written by Ken Derry,  gives extensive coverage to the activities that took place on Governors Island. He has enhanced his article with several personal interest stories from some of the participant unicyclists.

This last image appeared in the Columbia Spectator in an article entitled Unicyclers wheel quirky MoHi fest race written by Steven Lau. Steven interviewed several unicyclist at Grant’s Tomb gathering information in order to put together this article.

Many more websites that promote events around the New York city have given mention to this years unicycle festival. We would like to thank them for helping to promote unicycling in New York and this year’s unicycle festival. We hope that even more sites and sponsors will give us recognition for next year’s annual event.

Kyle Petersen’s interview on the Colbert Report aired on April 13, 2011. It features many clips that were taken at the New York Unicycle Club’s (NYUC) special meeting that was scheduled just to allow the camera crew access to a diverse variety of  NYUC members.

You can check out the background on Kyle’s story and the special NYUC meeting in this earlier post.

The 13th Annual Long Beach Island Unithon is scheduled for June 4, 2011. Come and be prepared for a 10:00am start.

The LBI Unithon is an annual 19 or so mile unicycle ride from Holgate at the southern tip of Long Beach Island to Barnegat Lighthouse at the northern end of the island.

Entry fees and sponsorship money for this event goes to benefit the Alliance for a Living Ocean an oganization that is devoted to promoting and maintaining clean water and a healthy coastal environment through education and action.

For event details, directions and entry form registration, consult the LBI Unithon website.

For up to date information join and consult the LBI Unithon facebook group page.

NYUC is calling for all members and regular visitors to join the Unicycling Society of America (USA). For insurance purposes having to do with our new permit for meeting at Grant’s Tomb each month, we require for all of our regular members attending club meetings to join up with an annual membership to USA. Member benefits includes, a subscription to One Wheel Magazine, the ability to participate at the North American Unicycling Championships and Convention (NAUCC). You will receive a membership card and will have voting privileges.

An annual membership costs $20 per individual and $35 for an entire family. At meetings, those attending that do not have a current USA membership card  beginning in 2011 will be asked to sign a waiver in order to unicycle in front of Grant’s Tomb.

You will have to mail in your form with payment since there is no provision for paying online. You can fill in and print out this membership form. Or you can just print out this paper form that you can fill in later.  Forms will be available at all club meetings.

After a purchase glitch, the Flickr site reverted to a free account for the last few weeks. The free account unfortunately only shows a portion of the content that is held on the site. I have resolved the issues with Flickr. Now that things are back in proper order, you have full access to all of the photographs taken for the last couple of years including the photographs from the last two well attended meetings that took place this month. The November meeting’s photograph are now available in this Slideshow.

Troy  Wharton from Realscape Media stopped by a recent New York Unicycle Club meeting to shoot some video and conduct a few interviews of club members.  The result is this nice two and a half minute video from Troy’s Youtube.com Reelscaper page. It is a brief visual description of what goes on at typical meeting of the New York Unicycle Club. The NYUC meets twice per month all year round.  The first Sunday and the third Saturday of any given month are our regular meetings. On those days expect to see unicyclist riding around in front of Grants’ Tomb.  Visit our Meetings page for more information and directions.