Actually, the central springed ball bearing detent retention system on the bearing piece was pretty cool, now that I remember seeing it.....

Reopening this Old Thread:
A friend of mine was given one of the first Cosmopolitan's from Harlen back in the 70's. He recently took it out of storage to show me.


Early HI-E Cosmopolitan


Front View

Interesting, i never knew Hi-E made a ladies/sport model!

There's a chance it is the only one. Great that it has been saved and cared for by a good owner!

that is very interesting!
I hadn't heard of a mixte version either. Likewise, I hadn't heard that Harlan made his own cranks... or at least I'm assuming that those are from Harlan??
Any chance that you've got more photos to share??

Steve in Peoria

Riveting. All these rare step through bikes popping up, an Eisentraut Limited, this one...

One of a kind, sounds like a good possibility. I noticed the seat cluster on this frame could possibly be a standard cosmopolitan seat cluster turned upside down.

So a bit of a crazy discovery here, but I just found that I am now the owner of the Lady HI-E Cosmopolitan pictured above! It is currently in my shed, we live about an hour south of Nashville, TN, which to my knowledge, is where Harlan lived when building these bikes.

This sounds like the first paragraph of a mystery novel... please continue with the story and shed some light on what happened!

Steve in Peoria

So, back in early December last year, we found out that the house that is the direct neighbor to my brother, his wife, and their 3 kids had come on the market. The wife and I love spending time with them, and we had all joke for years before how awesome it would be to live next to each other if we all moved someday. It was unfortunately a short sale, to which, the wife and I put an offer in, with one of the stipulations to make the offer look as appealing as possible, was to buy the house with everything still in it if the owner was okay with that. We had found out the owner was now living in New Jersey and weren't sure if he would want to haul everything back up there. Well they had learned about my family being the next door neighbor, as well as liked the offer, and accepted it. Upon taking ownership of the house, we had to begin clearing it out so we could paint it, do some small work, and move in. In the garage were a slew of miscellaneous bike frames and parts, as well as a complete built Mercian. Luckily, I didn't throw any of that away, I had moved it to the shed, but before that, I had started researching some of the frames, not thinking much of what looked like some "garage built stainless bike" that we didn't think anything of, as it didn't seem like much. Once I made it too it and started searching, only to realize there is little information out there, and how to some, this is almost a holy grail piece, I then realized what we were sitting on. A few months later of us too busy working on the house, inside and out, I decided it was finally time for me to do my due diligence and start to put the pieces together, which was yesterday when I went and took pictures of the bikes in the shed, and came here to post.

The Lady HE belonged to a nice guy in my town named Phil. He had some physical issues and I would stop by to help with his bike collection. I lost contact with him during COVID. One of his siblings must have moved his things to TN. He also had a nice Titanium Lemond, a yellow Mercian and a few frames by Meech. Can't wait to see some pictures.