It was a great year for skateboarding — especially in New York, but also beyond — despite being especially rough on humans otherwise. Let’s get this one rolling :)
25. Rodrigo Goes to the Wrong Spot
A few years back, it was brought to our attention that some devil lifted the entire QS spots page, made a PDF out of it, and provided it to Adidas for some wear test they were doing. I’m sure they billed them $50k for it — meanwhile, our check got lost in the mail, and the QS office remained in a 5’ x 5’ Chinatown cubicle for years to come.
Presumably ridden with guilt, Adidas didn’t take food out of our children’s mouths for their most recent trip to New York. They did, however, hire an inexperienced spot guide who both 1) took them to the wrong Three-Up Three-Down, and 2) has problems counting. Given the fact that skating on the real Three-Up to an unprecedented spike in quality this year, maybe it was time to turn our eyes towards its chubbier cousin anyway.
24. Sahbabii Releases SANDAS
We were wrong with last year’s prediction re: NBA Youngboy supplanting 21 Savage as 2017’s premier IG clip #musicsupervision. The Boy’s 2017 output solidified him as too much of a bluesman for the superficial demands of skate clip rap music, though it did earn him a #1 spot on LiveMixtapes’ “Most Searched” ranking, which obviously matters more anyway.
No, apart from that one week in the middle of the summer where literally every skate clip was edited to “Bank Account,” Sahbabii’s debut dominated the majority of #musicsupervision decisions on the skateboard social media circuit.
23. Someone Films the World Trade Ledge From the Second Story Window Across the Street
Anyone who says film school is a waste of money never found a new angle for one of the most oft-skated ledges in Manhattan on his way back from taking a piss in the pizza restaurant across the street.
22. Atlantic Drift Enters the Third Dimension of Skating Verizon Banks
The goal in life should be finding someone as committed to you as skateboarders are to skating the Verizon Banks after the building has continued to skate-stop it in every possible way.
21. The City Kicks Skateboarding in the Collective Crotch By Ruining All the Bike Lanes
Were the bike lanes perfect? No. You gotta deal with self-righteous bike assholes reminding you “it’s a fucking bike lane, buddy” every two minutes, sometimes it’ll spill you out into an abyss of traffic (hello, 34th and 6th), and it doesn’t look sexy when you film it in Super-8 for your “Summer to Trip to New York” montage.
It got the job done, though — that is, until the city completely fucked all of us by recoating it with a green textured paint that makes it borderline impossible to skate on this year, shooting us back into the middle of traffic to audition for the next 5Boro interlude ;)
20. L.E.S. Double-Set Briefly Becomes #relevant
No matter what trick you did down it — switch backside 360, switch frontside 540 — you’re still rolling away with a skatepark in the background. Nothing down the L.E.S. Park’s double-set counted in the “real” world.
Except for the kid who ollied down it…on a Citibike.
19. The Wallie Shit Gets Really Out of Hand
While one of the current millennium’s most influential skateboarders took it upon himself to tell us that wallies weren’t a trick this year, we were too busy doing them off of piles of snow and, um, books we found on the street and propped up on a curb.
18. The Entire City of New York Moves to Barcelona For January
There are other crew shots but these were the only two found after two minutes of looking ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Due to some sort of crack-up in the system, direct round-trip flights from JFK to Barcelona were running for just under $400 last December. So what would have been high-season for San Juan getaways became running into Chachi 36,000 feet up in the air, and running into every other person with a job (and some still probably without one) you’ve seen skate L.E.S. at MACBA.
Or the bar, considering it rained for 70% of the time.
17. Utica Avenue Spot
There aren’t many places remaining in New York to be left alone in; most of our D.I.Y. spots are pop-ups tucked into a corner, and the B.Q.E. Lot is facing its end soon. The Utica D.I.Y. was an anomaly for 2017 in that it was a wide-enough space that left us to our own devices. That is, for a bit until the cops came and you know the rest :(
Max Palmer Never Hurt Nobody 2018.
16. Chase Got Interesting
You don’t become one of New York’s remaining, unaltered relics of nineties skateboarding without getting a bit, er, boring. Unless you’re Gino or something, doing a trick up, on flat, and down the five at Chase that won’t look like the last sixty lines filmed there is a near-impossible proposition.
Thanks to a scaffold temporarily put in place over the steps, and some Blue Couch guy doing the ride-on grind of death by the ten-stair, things got a bit ~weirder~ than usual at Chase this year.
Mini Bonus 5 — A Hat Tip To Trip Clips That Got More Than One View At The Office! You momentarily re-instill an enthusiasm for skating spots we have otherwise been to six billion times ;)
– “Everyone On Earth Is a Nerd”
– “Double Egg & Cheese”
– “Putnam Ave”
– “Nesh”
– “Heavenly“
shout out to sweet waste and his recent ankle surgery …stay up kid
That 5boro line got me rolling! Well done.
i’m praying BQE lot becomes at least another proxy seaport