Hog Heaven : A 2nd-Floor ‘Mini-Mall’ Just for Bikers Opens in Santa Clarita

This is one “mini-mall” without a nail salon, video store or dry cleaner.

But you can order spare chains for your chopper, pick up some snakeskin earrings and get a tattoo of the Grim Reaper on your back.

Talk about convenient shopping.

Welcome to Top Hog, billed by its owners as the first mini-mall devoted strictly to bikers, providing parts, service and accessories for the Harley Davidson set who are devotees of the biker lifestyle.

The mini-mall label stretches things a bit. Top Hog is a far cry from the squatty, uninspiring buildings that occupy street corners throughout Los Angeles. This mini-mall is really a clutch of four businesses, all dedicated to motorcycles, filling the top floor of a two-story commercial building.

Hours are flexible. “I was open until 6 in the morning,” Top Hog owner Doug Gerrard said of a recent business day. “I had customers.”

The unlikely setting for this collection of hardware, leather and tattoo ink is squeaky-clean Santa Clarita, a suburban retreat described even by locals as “Leave It to Beaver” Country and “Des Moines with palm trees.”

Presiding over Top Hog is Gerrard, a burly, bearded motorcycle mechanic who founded a repair shop alongside Soledad Canyon Road nearly two years ago. As the business grew, he moved his office to the vacant commercial space above an auto parts store, a short walk from the original Top Hog.

One day three months ago, Gerrard decided to divide the vacant space into smaller cubicles and rent the smaller units to biker businesses. When he first moved into the building, “there was nothing up here,” Gerrard said, holding up the floor plan he devised to create the string of stores.

On a corner of the floor plan, someone had attached a small slip of paper with the observation: “It’ll never work.”

“That’s our motto,” Gerrard said.

Gerrard’s first tenant was Matthew Fisher, a former gun shop owner and firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service, who opened an accessory shop he dubbed Exclusive Hog. Fisher offers T-shirts, belt buckles, jewelry, leather jackets and even biker-lady lingerie. Fisher had to sell his prized Panhead cycle to open the shop and admits that business must pick up to keep the shop solvent.

“I’ve gotten myself in a hole,” he said, “but I’m going to get out.” Fisher has big dreams. He hopes to export motorcycle fashions overseas, particularly the old communist bloc. “Eastern Europe Top Hog,” he said, trying out the name.

Other tenants include a silk-screening shop, a rock band that rehearses in a soundproof room, and Ink Fever, a tiny tattoo shop run by Jack Ryan, a pony-tailed 27-year-old who said he jumped at the chance to open his own shop for only $220 in monthly rent. “Tattoos and Harley Davidson go together,” Ryan said as he applied a bat to a man’s chest.

The Top Hog crowd appears to be a congenial bunch, and the six men who work there insist they have had few conflicts. Of course, there was the time Gerrard learned why his customers were not buying air fresheners he was selling for $1.25. The answer was found in Fisher’s store across the hall: “He had the same air fresheners for $1,” Gerrard said.

Gerrard said his customers come from all walks of life. Many customers, he said, are police officers and sheriff’s deputies. And, despite the rough and tumble image of bikers, he insists that Top Hog walks a straight and narrow line. “This is a totally drug-free shop,” he said.

During the Gulf War, the men of Top Hog joined Santa Clarita residents who gathered nightly on a street corner to wave flags in support of U.S. troops.

When peace demonstrators heckled the flag-waving demonstrators, “We told them to leave them alone,” he said sternly. “They complied.”