For New York City’s Dirt Bikers, There Is No Place to Ride

The dirt bikers were not blasting through the Bronx and Upper Manhattan neighborhoods where, over the past few years, the noisy bikes and riders who flout traffic laws have provoked increasing public ire. Instead, that late October afternoon, they did their tricks on a desolate road on Long Island that ended at a quarry.

The outcry has become even more pitched since Sept. 29, when a pack of motorcyclists was involved in an altercation on the Henry Hudson Parkway with a man driving an S.U.V. The police said some of the motorcyclists pulled the driver from his vehicle and beat him. One motorcyclist was hospitalized, and this month 11 men, including an undercover police officer, were indicted in connection with the attack; all but one were charged with gang assault. And while helmet-cam videos do not show dirt bikers in that melee, bikers say the authorities are intent on shutting down their urban sport.

Even on that dead-end road on Long Island, in 45 minutes the ride was over.

“I don’t even know why you guys buy these bikes,” a state law enforcement officer who pulled into the quarry said. “There’s nowhere to ride them.”

The riders had to leave, he said, or else.

Back in Harlem, they unloaded the bikes and rode off into the streets. Fire trucks and police cruisers showed up almost instantly. It is illegal to ride a dirt bike on New York City streets.

“This is why we rip and run in the streets,” Joseph Middleton, 31, a biker from Harlem, said. “There really is nowhere to ride.”

So far this year in the city, there have been at least 437 motorcyclist and dirt biker arrests: nearly 200 for reckless endangerment or reckless driving, and 5,498 summonses for license plate violations and other infractions. Joseph A. McCormack, the chief of vehicular crimes at the Bronx district attorney’s office, said prosecutors there had seen a sharp rise in the number of cases involving dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles in recent years. There were more than 200 cases — including reckless driving, vehicle violations and, in a few instances, striking pedestrians — this summer alone.

Inspector Rodney Harrison is the commanding officer of a Central Harlem precinct where complaints about bikers from residents rank among the top reported to the police. He said that more than 1,440 illegal dirt bikes, motorcycles and A.T.V.’s were confiscated in the first nine months of the year, in stops and in raids on places like ministorage businesses. Police helicopters also help ground units track the vehicles.

Still, the police distinguish between the riders and street gangs. “They’re not out there robbing and stealing,” Inspector Harrison said.

Though groups of motorcyclists call to mind the Hells Angels, dirt bike riders are not a unified pack. They come from different neighborhoods, range in age from high school students to people in their early 30s and ride in loose affiliations with names like Harlem Legendz and the Go Hard Boyz. Their diverse makeup, bikers say, means they are the rare group that is largely immune to the block-by-block tensions that plague poor areas of the city.

“You know how on Sundays some people go to church?” said Ben Charles, 28, a dirt-biking advocate known as Benmore. “This is our church.”

Riders blend Motocross speed and Evel Knievel daring on bikes bought and traded over the Internet, swapped among friends, or, in the case of at least one ninth-grader from Harlem, bought by a father to keep his son out of more serious trouble.

“We made something of our own, which was a culture, and we kept each other out of trouble,” said Mr. Charles, a paralegal. “What would you rather these kids do?”