Zebra Cakes, Fudge Rounds, Oatmeal Pies, Star Crunch, Lil’ Hug, Lemon Heads, Sunnydale

When you’re a kid, all you want to do is skateboard. Jobs, rent, relationships, student loans, “your future,” whether or not the girl working the door at the place you’re going to after you give up on skating for the night will let you get in with your board — none of these things seemed like they’d be bearing down on you at any point soon. And even if you did happen to have a job, real-life ambitions, or a concern for your future that exceeds the typical, borderline non-existent foresight of an average skateboarder, all of these things got put in the backseat when you woke up on that first sixty-degree Saturday in mid-March, or even in those last remaining crumbs of tolerability on the cusp of 32-degrees once December had set in.

Nobody is really able to skate Downtown and Midtown in the same day anymore. But when you’re younger, the day seems incomplete if you call it quits just after the sun sets. You either hop on the train, or push for forty blocks up there to save yourself the $1.50 (or $2.) Some nights were cut off early, when you’d still be out at an hour reasonable enough to bump into groups of tourists looking for landmarks they’d recognize from Sex and the City. Other times, you’d be on the streets to the point when you only share them with a few token Halal carts, and the ubiquitous patch of cab drivers on graveyard shifts surrounding them. Either way, it was skate, get kicked out, move along, repeat.

As you get older, you have more things to worry about, and less time to get it all done. What was once an unavoidable debate between the 6 to Grand Central or the N to 49th Street is flipped into whether to make the voyage north of 14th Street altogether. Either you’re taking it easy because you need to be up for work in the morning, have a paper due, or succumbing to the temptation of the relative simplicity that comes with hanging out and getting drunk, there is a certain point everyone reaches that simply disables them from skating for ten consecutive hours.

When you’re fifteen, pushing around the city with little concern for what the time is, you learn how to make your money stretch. Regardless of if you had a little side hustle or got it from your parents, you restricted your options to dollar-menus, slices, 99-cent cans of Arizona iced tea, 50-cent Tropical Fantasy sodas, and Little Debbie snack cakes, for a mere quarter. Especially when you your pockets only contained some loose change, a Metrocard, and nuggets of wax, the quarter snack was the most viable option.

As soon as you reach the point when you can afford $15 cheeseburgers and overpriced rent for a Lower East Side hole-in-the-wall, the quarter snack becomes the symbol of simpler time, back when you were wholly content with skating on a diet that might inevitably lead to blood sugar disease down the line. It didn’t really matter though, things were less complicated, and a lot more fun.

A New York website bound together with a love for skateboarding. Quartersnacks has been online since the fall of 2005. It is ran by one half of the now defunct, 5050-Skateboarding website that was online from 2001 to 2004. Quartersnacks was redesigned and rebooted to a Version 3 in May of 2010 after a half-year of irregular update habits. It has been featured in The Skateboard Mag, The New York Times, on ESPN.com and others.

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Acknowledgements go to Allen Ying, John Roman, Keegan Gibbs, and Zach-Malfa Kowalski for a handful of the photography found throughout this website, to Martin Davis and Francesco Pini for several illustrations throughout the site, and to The Chrome Ball Incident for many scans of older magazine photos used throughout the Spots section.

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*As a note regarding the graphic and photo content: This site, like many others, grabs images from a variety of sources (Flickr, Google, etc.) to accompany content, and is not always able to trace back to origin of the image to its original owner. So if your work is represented on here, and you would like it taken down, or given credit for, please contact us immediately and we will accommodate you in whatever way possible.