For the most part, the motorcycles are all British and European. Brands like Triumph, Matchless, Norton and BSA adorn most of the bikes in the shop.
Don’t bother asking Adam Cramer how many motorcycles he owns.
“I don’t count ‘em,” he told The Star from inside his motorcycle shop at 2212 Sepviva St. in Fishtown called Liberty Vintage. “Cause I might be worried that I have too many and sell some stupidly. And then I might think I have too few and buy some more.”
For the most part, the motorcycles are all British and European. Brands such as Triumph, Matchless, Norton and BSA adorn most of the bikes in the shop. There are no Harley-Davidsons though.
“The thing with the Harleys is,” Cramer said in his typical half-talking-half-yelling manner, “is Harleys have gone into a whole ‘nother splinter group, and I don’t have the doo-rag collection to hang out with those guys all the time.”
That was just one of Cramer’s many one-liners over the course of the interview. Unfortunately, most of them weren’t appropriate enough to be published in a newspaper that considers itself a “community newsweekly.”
Cramer is talkative and friendly, but he still has an old-school tough guy demeanor. He’s a biker through and through. In fact, his personality earned him his own TV show on the Discovery Channel. It was called Philly Throttle, and it was about all the cool bikes that came into Cramer’s shop.
“I thought it would be the greatest thing in the world,” Cramer said about the show, which only aired three of the 16 planned episodes in 2013. “But when reality hits you, no, I would just rather be big in my own head.”
Cramer, who, interestingly, is the cousin of CNBC’s Mad Money host Jim Cramer, said the show still airs in Europe and Asia.
Among his rarest hogs are a 1931 Matchless Model X with a 29 Brough Superior Side Car, a 1949 Matchless Twin Cylinder, a 1941 British military bike, a 1948 Norton, a 1951 Ceccato (“there are probably less than a dozen of that model left,” he said), and a 1935 DKW. He said that there’s only 10 1935 DKWs left in the country.
DKW, a German brand, later turned into the present-day automobile company Audi.
“That’s like a 1935 Audi motorcycle,” Cramer said. “Germans hate me because I have it. That’s like some German guy having a super rare Harley.”
Cramer got his first motorcycle in either 1981 or 1982. It was a 1980 Honda dirt bike. Well, technically it was his brother’s, but he stole it.
“[My brother] only rode it like four or five times,” he said. “So I staged a break-in at our house, took it out of the garage and stashed it in the woods and my family knew. A few years ago, I go, ‘you know I stole the dirt bike?’ He goes ‘yeah,’ he said, ‘you were the kid in the woods with my dirt bike?’”
Although Cramer’s shop is impressive, he’s looking to rent out half of it, or about 4,000 square feet’s worth. He wants to rent it to somebody who will “do something cool that I will enjoy,” he said, like a bike shop, a restaurant or “something that my wife would like to tell her friends about.”
“I’m open to anything,” he said. “I’m going to tailor it to the person who is the best fit.”
For more information about renting out half of Cramer’s bike shop, contact him at 267–973–9421 or stop in his shop at 2212 Sepviva St.
