On a sunny Saturday morning in Norfolk, a couple dozen riders roll down the Elizabeth River Trail to the sound of DJ Bee's beats. The music comes from a boombox, the pace is unhurried, and nobody had to register, pay, or sign anything to join. That is the whole idea behind the LIVE.LIFE.FRESH • Boom Box Bike Ride, a weekly cruise that has been gathering riders since May 2019.
The ride meets at the ERT Trailside Headquarter Building at the corner of Orapax Street and Raleigh Avenue, with wheels up at 10:30 a.m. It is a casual cruise around Norfolk using the city's bike lanes and the Elizabeth River Trail, and it is explicitly family-friendly — a way for newer riders to get comfortable navigating the trail and the lanes alongside a group that knows them well. The ride is led by Freshtopia, the Norfolk record store and hip-hop shop, so riders are asked to follow Freshtopia for last-minute weather changes or updates. It runs every Saturday, weather permitting.
The origin story starts with a storefront and a bike lane. Fresh Radio, DJ Bee's online station, launched on October 10, 2010, playing classic and progressive hip-hop, R&B, soul, reggae, funk, pop, disco, and boogie, with mixes from DJs worldwide. Freshtopia, the retail shop and record store, launched in January 2019 and operated inside the Fresh Radio studio on the first floor of MacArthur Center Mall in downtown Norfolk. As the Elizabeth River Trail Foundation's community partner spotlight recounts, Fresh Radio and Freshtopia moved to 35th Street in January 2019 — a block that has the only center-running bike lane in Norfolk and connects directly to the ERT.
That location planted the seed. Bee and his wife noticed there were no Bike Month activities scheduled for 35th Street in May 2019, so they called a group of friends who ride and organized the first LIVE.LIFE.FRESH Boom Box Bike Ride. They met on the first Saturday in May and rode around using the bike lanes and the trail. When the month ended, they simply kept going. "May is Bike Month and we decided to do a weekly bike ride and when the month of May in 2019 ended, we continued," DJ Bee told WTKR. The idea, he said, came from wanting to see the lanes actually used.
Bee — who keeps his real name private — is a veteran DJ and turntablist with more than 28 years of terrestrial radio experience, and the founder of Fresh Radio, Freshtopia, and Live Life Fresh Wellness. He can be heard daily on itsfreshradio.com and hosts the Fresh Start Morning Show from 6 to 10 a.m. weekdays on 91.1 FM, NSU Radio, in Hampton Roads. Freshtopia, meanwhile, is one of the very few Black-owned brick-and-mortar record stores in the United States; the shop's own site describes it as one of roughly 30 Black-owned record stores in the country, and it was featured in Essence Magazine's list of Black-owned record stores to visit across the country. The store sells new and used vinyl and cassettes, and it sits in what Record Store Day calls the Soul District of Park Place.
That neighborhood context matters to the ride. West 35th Street was, until the 1960s, a thriving commercial strip inside the solidly middle-class Park Place neighborhood, before storefronts gave way to decades of decline. In recent years the city has funded decorative lighting, benches, and trash receptacles, repaired sidewalks, replaced water and sewer lines, resurfaced the street, and added bike lanes — the same lanes Bee wanted to see filled. The ride is, in a small way, a weekly vote for that revitalization.
The route itself is a tour of a Norfolk many residents never see. "When we ride, the Elizabeth River Trail and the bike lanes take you through places of Norfolk you might never have seen before so every new rider is like, 'I didn't know this is back here, this don't look like Norfolk,'" Bee told WTKR. "So it's good, they get to see the city." The trail that carries them is about 10.5 miles long and links many of Norfolk's parks, neighborhoods, commercial centers, and its waterfront. Its own history began in 1994, when the West Ghent Civic League, the Norfolk Historical Society, Norfolk Southern Corporation, and the City of Norfolk converged on a shared vision: a walking route linking Plum Point Park to West Ghent, and better access to the historic Fort Norfolk, which dates to 1807 and helped defend the city during the War of 1812. After three unsuccessful applications for federal alternative transportation funding, Norfolk Southern agreed in October 1999 to donate 3,500 feet of its old Atlantic City Spur to the city for the trail's first segment.
Riders on the Boom Box ride now start from a much newer piece of that story. The Elizabeth River Trail Foundation opened its Trailside Headquarters — the building riders know as the "Welcome to Chelsea Blue Building" — at Raleigh Avenue and Orapax Street, with a grand opening tied to Celebrate Trails Day on April 25, 2026. It is a fitting launch point for a ride that has always been about using the infrastructure rather than just admiring it.
The ride's rhythm has shifted with the city. It largely did not happen in 2020, and returned in March 2021, according to WTKR. Six years after that first Saturday, the Elizabeth River Trail Foundation noted, the group was still riding through 35th Street, starting from the new MacArthur Center location. The route has been described as an eight-mile casual ride leaving from Newport Plaza on 35th Street in earlier seasons, and the meeting point has since moved to the ERT headquarters.
What has not changed is the spirit. Bee talks about cycling as a way to clear the mind — the careful attention of watching for traffic, and the ideas that surface along the way. "You start thinking about things," he told WTKR. "You're being careful and making sure you don't get hit, but you're also coming up with ideas on the way to work and you'll be able to tackle the day a lot better I think, with a clear mind." He is also blunt about the obvious: "Who doesn't want to ride their bike to work?" he said, laughing. "It should also be National Shower at Work Day."
For anyone curious about the October 10 ride, the logistics are as simple as they come. Show up at the ERT Trailside Headquarter Building at Orapax Street and Raleigh Avenue — the calendar listing notes riders gather at 10 a.m. ahead of a 10:30 a.m. start — bring a bike, and ride. No fee, no registration, no experience required. Just a boombox, a group of riders, and a few miles of Norfolk that look different from the seat of a bike.