Once upon a time in America, Schwinn and bicycles were synonymous, and Chicago was the center of the two-wheeled, pedal-powered universe.

Baby boomers grew up riding or aspiring to ride a Schwinn — sturdy, sleek and sexy bikes such as the incomparable Sting-Ray chopper — built by the family-owned, Chicago-based company for nearly a century before it spun into bankruptcy in the 1990s.

The remarkable rise and fall of Schwinn is the subject of a new documentary by emerging filmmaker Daniel Clarke, tracing the history of the most iconic bike maker of the 20th century — once a brand on par with Coke or McDonald’s.

“It’s a story of 100 years of Americana, and really a rich story of 100 years of cycling as well,” said Clarke, 36.

The first full-length film by Clarke, “No Hands: The Wild Ride of the Schwinn Bicycle Company,” has essentially been 30 years in the making. It is based on a 1996 book of the same name by Chicago authors Judith Crown and Glenn Coleman.

From 1950s-era cruisers to the Sting-Ray of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Schwinn was the largest bike manufacturer in the U.S., with more than 1 million two-wheelers produced annually at its peak. By the new millennium, Schwinn was out of the family’s hands and just another bike brand in a dramatic downfall.

“We were amazed no one had told the story yet, because it is mind-blowingly interesting,” Clarke said. “It’s a much more unexpected and exhilarating ride than I would expect people to think it’s going to be.”

The story starts in 1895, when German immigrants Ignaz Schwinn and Adolph Arnold founded Arnold, Schwinn & Co. in Chicago. Schwinn would subsequently buy out his partner and build an enduring family business that would reign over the bicycle industry for generations, surviving the rise of the automobile, the Depression and two world wars.

In fact, the original six-story Schwinn factory at Lake and Peoria streets in Chicago still stands as a monument to they city's erstwhile bike company, with plans to redevelop the now-vacant building into office space.

Schwinn’s manufacturing footprint expanded greatly over the years, starting with its 1911 acquisition of the Chicago-based Excelsior motorcycle company. Schwinn became a major American player in the early motorcycle business until the Great Depression.

The bicycle business continued to grow over the decades, however, bolstered by a number of key developments under second-generation family owner Frank W. Schwinn.

In 1933, Schwinn rolled out the first car-like balloon tires, making bikes better able to withstand punctures. It introduced the Paramount racing bike in 1938, and after diverting production at its Chicago factories to the military effort during World War II, Schwinn geared up with a new line of post-war bikes that became the signature ride for the next decade.

The so-called tank cruisers such as the Black Phantom featured chrome fenders, whitewall tires, headlights and spring forks. The catalog also included more sedate adult bikes as well, and with the advent of an authorized dealer network, Schwinn accounted for 1 in 4 bikes sold in America during the 1950s.

Pee-wee Herman’s modified red-and-white 1953 Schwinn DX Cruiser — the holy grail of his 1985 “Big Adventure” film — is emblematic of the era.

In 1963, Schwinn introduced the Sting-Ray, a chopper-style bike with raised handlebars, a banana seat, a rear slick and the ability to do wheelies, making it the coolest bike around and the stuff of adolescent dreams. Schwinn took it up a notch with the 1968 rollout of the colorful Krate editions, a souped-up Sting-Ray that included a dragster-like stickshift on the top tube.

For years, Schwinn could not make enough Sting-Rays to keep up with demand. But by the early ‘80s, Sting-Ray production ended and slow to adapt to changing tastes, the company lost traction during the BMX and mountain bike boom.

As market share dwindled, Schwinn began outsourcing production. By 1983, Schwinn ceased its Chicago manufacturing, laying off 1,800 employees and moving most of its production overseas to Taiwan.

In 1992, struggling with debt, the storied Chicago company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy under fourth-generation owner Ed Schwinn.

Schwinn was purchased out of bankruptcy in 1993 for $40 million by Zell/Chilmark Fund, a Chicago-based investment group headed by Sam Zell, who more than a decade later would take Tribune Company private in an $8.2 billion leveraged buyout that precipitated the media giant’s own bankruptcy.

The bike company has rolled on under a succession of new owners and is now part of Dutch conglomerate Pon, with Schwinn based in Madison, Wisconsin. But the movie focuses on the Chicago glory years, when the Schwinn brand ruled the sidewalks, schoolyards and bike lanes.

“If you didn’t get a Schwinn, you were disappointed when you were a kid in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s,” Clarke said. “I think now it’s just another brand.”

Slated to debut in the spring, the 75-minute documentary is narrated by Lance Armstrong, the former Tour de France champion who grew up riding a Schwinn Mag Scrambler and won some of his early races on a Paramount.

The first film by Unfeatured Films, Clarke’s new documentary studio, “No Hands” is backed by the producers of “A LEGO Brickumentary” and “Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk.”

As part of the movie, Clarke interviewed Richard Schwinn, a fourth-generation scion of the family bike company, who went on post-bankruptcy to launch his own brand, Wisconsin-based Waterford Precision Cycles.

“It is the first time that the Schwinn family themselves are ever really thoughtfully telling the story on camera,” Clarke said.

At the center of his new film, Clarke said the bikes are the stars.

Unfeatured Films, which bills itself as blending “premium production, human-first creativity and AI innovation,” employed the latest technology to bring the Schwinn story to life. In addition to filming collectors with vintage bikes, Clarke used artificial intelligence to enhance a century of faded photos, ads and catalogs for the documentary.

“We’ve been able to use cutting-edge AI technology to restore historical photos in a very historically accurate way,” Clarke said. “That is technology that’s really never before seen at this scale, which is really exciting.”

In the end, Clarke hopes viewers will find the story of a family-owned bicycle company whose heyday still stirs vivid emotions for people of a certain age, as compelling as he does.

But don’t expect the film to offer a simple answer as to what brought Schwinn from America’s bicycle brand to bankruptcy.

“There’s a lot of factors,” Clarke said. “We just want the audience to kind of decide that for themselves. It’s got kind of a murder-mystery vibe to it.”

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