America’s Next Top Triangle

To everyone still @ing us on social media to let us know that The Triangle™ is back: no the fuck it’s not. The cement is shit, the pink bumps are shit, and nobody on the Frog team has responded to a “are you skating?”-text in a month :(

But we’re no less still hooked on triangles, desperate to restore the joy of E. 9th Street’s onetime premier destination for a 50% chance of getting hit by a car. Philly skaters forced Love Park into resurrection once City Hall was destroyed, and Muni became a natural alternative once Love met the same fate. However riddled with champagne problems New York skateboarding may be — we never had the luxury of being able to replace something as special as Love by walking across the street to a nearly-as-good spot.

Like an opioid epidemic, once the good designer shit runs scarce, the demand for shittier alternatives rises. And lately, people have been skating some shitty triangles.

If you watch Instagram stories from anybody who has met up at L.E.S. Park this fall, you have no doubt seen them skating this hunk of mundane triangular cement at the beginning of Manhattan’s second most smelliest block. (#1 is a no brainer, though we have runner-ups for days.) The curb cuts are borderline non-existent, and the traffic is twice as hectic as the O.G. triangle, yet it manages to reel in anyone who hasn’t otherwise been having a torrid love affair with the new Bushwick basketball court ledges.

A post shared by :) (@_kevintierney) on Nov 12, 2017 at 8:09pm PST

The area surrounding Blubba has a magnetic pull for any group of weekenders. There’s the hubba itself, which apparently, people don’t even bother skating on anymore. There’s the rail across the street that the feds will shoot you for even looking at. And of course, there’s the Courthouse Drop, New York’s most famous backdrop for scorpioning onto the sidewalk from six feet above. Men and children alike flock to this trinity of high-velocity skate spots. In other words, they’re not looking to skate something that’s four inches off the ground.

That is, until now, when one of the most oft-recurring lower Manhattan spots in the 917 video is the granite triangle just south of the Blubba. (Also big shout out to Andy Bautista for making this spot pop in like 2008, when everyone else was otherwise filming frontside 180 nosegrinds down the hubba.)

And finally, we have the actual new Triangle™. Skateboarding has no shortage of conservatives quick to assume anything they don’t understand is some sort of “ironic” dog-whistle, but trying to skate the remodeled Triangle seems like the ultimate exercise in futility. Then again, we’ve only caught footage of the new Triangle™ in a video filmed on a camera made by Nintendo, so bear in mind that they’re also operating on a higher plane than any of us.

Are we missing any?