Can’t Go Skateboarding Day

June 21st, 2011 | 4:25 pm | Time Capsule | 12 Comments

As most spend the first day of summer / “Go Skateboarding Day” at various skateboard industry P.R. initiatives, Quartersnacks would like to reflect on many of the spots that are no longer with us. We would hypothetically love to go skateboarding today, but the ways of the world continue to make the act of riding a skateboard outside of a designated space more difficult each and every year. (All due respect to all those who continue to advocate for skateparks, but skateparks are not a replacement for street spots. Leave that sort of logic to sixty-year-old city council members, not people who actually skate.) Predictably, many of these places have fallen out of the public’s concern since people have ceased skating there (maybe 2 out of 11 had or have a greater general public v.s. skateboarding public occupancy ratio.) It’s amazing just how much people love to complain when you give them something to complain about, and how little they actually care once the end-point for their desired result happens.

Thanks for the memories.

Keep your kids out the kitchen!

February 21st, 2011 | 10:08 am | Daily News | 4 Comments

The much mythologized Burger King at Fulton and Gold Street, of Brooklyn Banks era fame, is officially gone. Even though its relevance dwindled over the past decade (beyond the “free” refills utilized by cost-cutting skateboarders), it is still among the most prominent fast food establishments within skateboarding’s history books. Be sure to check out Quartersnacks’ Brooklyn Banks week from last summer for plenty of stories about this particular Burger King and some background info on its significance.

Kevin has a checkout in the new (April 2011) issue of Transworld. Here’s a picture of the page. It’s not a scan, so it’s not the best quality, but you can still mostly read everything there. That Sunset Park 5050 is pretty wild.

They moved a bunch of planters at the Mars 2112 bank on 50th Street and Seventh Avenue. The runway used to be a tight curve in, and now the thing is approachable from straight on. Makes a difficult spot mildly less difficult to skate.

Danny Falla already shot a photo (with snow in the background, of course) of a backside flip over the ledge to street gap across from the Federal Reserve. You can get time there, but the outdoor guards will kick you out after a while, insisting that you’re going to sue the Federal Reserve when you jump into traffic and get hit by a car. That actually sounds like a brilliant idea.

Probably the funniest video of an ollie up a curb you’ll ever see.

An interview with the man behind The Chrome Ball Incident, which addresses the frequent question of what the name means. (“The Chrome Ball Incident was a comic strip that Neil Blender used to come up with every now and then. It was a three-panel comic strip and the chrome ball would come through and just smash something.”)

Here is part two of 2nd Nature’s California trip, this time in San Jose. Check last week’s post for the Los Angeles edition. San Francisco is slated to be up next.

There’s a new, pretty gnarly-looking, all-brick quarterpipe to a wall at the Below the Bridge skatepark in Bayonne. Given the weather’s turn for the worse, it looks like refuge might continue to be sought there for quite some time.

Ryan Gee with a 1997 Quim Cardona classic at the old Jersey City Hamilton Park pyramid.

Another throwback clip of the week, thanks to the person who linked it up in the last Monday Links post: Keith Hufnagel and friends from Transworld’s fifth video, Interface. The ollie up on the bench, over the planter to lipslide on 37th Street still has to be one of the sickest tricks ever done in New York. You can catch a lot of the photos from this bit of footage in these interview scans we posted a while back.

Quartersnacks tee shirts and cruiser boards will be available for purchase off the website tomorrow morning. Real this time.

Quote of the Week:
“Do you even know what The Onion is? It’s a fake newspaper.” — Tron Jenkins
“Damn, really? I always think it’s mad real.” — E.J.

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The Events That Defined New York City Skateboarding in 2010: 10-6

December 28th, 2010 | 1:16 pm | Features & Interviews | 7 Comments

Slightly behind schedule, but down to the final ten… #25-21, #20-16, #15-11.

10. The rise in popularity and subsequent banning of Four Loko

The lifeblood of New York skateboarding has always been diluted with alcohol. When sizing up the abilities of skateboarders in this city, is it important to not merely assess tricks, but the social environment within which these tricks are accomplished. It is not what tricks you can do, but what tricks you can do after waking up at 5 P.M. with half of a six pack you purchased at 4:48 in the morning still in your fridge, a pounding headache, and your friend-who-used-to-skate’s unread mass text about his acquisition of a bottle in six hours. Film a part amongst this madness (or avoid it altogether), and you will be ranked among the greats. If you falter, well, you’re just like the rest of them.

This dependence on alcohol is not comical, or tangential by any means, and it all begins with one simple exposure. For the pre-internet nineties, it was the frequent sight of the 40 ounce bottle in Kids that told youngsters what to drink. In the early-2000s, half of the under-eighteen contingent that would skate flat in the back of Union Square past 10 P.M. was introduced to alcohol through Sparks. And even further down the line, the 2008 opening of Trader Joe’s on 14th Street brought forth the availability of $2 wine for a whole slew of younger degenerates, bringing new relevance to the otherwise outdated term, “wine-o.” But 2010 was hit hard with the youth-marketed Four Loko beverages, which fueled this past summer with relentless forays into bad decisions, and can now be found on Craigslist for $10 a can.

Brooklyn Banks Week: Ian Reid Interview

July 18th, 2010 | 11:25 am | Features & Interviews | 7 Comments

I’m ending this thing off with Ian because he was the first dude I ever met who was getting coverage in videos when I was growing up and first started going to the Banks. A common question throughout all these interviews has been, “Who would you see?” The best things about spots like the Banks when you’re a kid is that you get to see people you’ve been watching in videos (it wears off pretty quickly, I know.) Nowadays, you might bump into someone trying a line downtown for some shitty web clip, but it’s not the same as showing up to the Banks in August and seeing Dill, Muska, and Jamie Thomas occupy the same spot simultaneously.

In Ian’s case, he was always around, he was always recognizable, and if you were a little kid, he was by far the most approachable dude out of any older skaters you might’ve run across when you were younger. So while a lot of these stories might make the people who frequented Banks sound really stand-offish, there were exceptions to the rule.

Hopefully, everyone enjoyed these interviews. Thanks again to Ted and The Chrome Ball Incident.

Interview by Ted Barrow on September 30, 2006

+++++++

I benihana’d that shit. That was my claim to fame — a benihaha over that shit. Yeah, dope.

When was that?

It was ’93, baby. Yeah, that’s when I first – Brian used to do benihanas and I thought it was sick.

Did you skate both the Banks and Love?

I’ve been to two out of four, and I was there when two out of four monumental events occurred. The Banks, I was here, I’m from New York. Love, I was there, my man BW put it down. Pulaski, I never fucked with. When I was in DC, I wasn’t skatin’. I was on some other shit. And EMB, I just wasn’t into Frisco. I missed the EMB shit. I saw the new one. I wasn’t into the old one. I wished I did, I wanted to see it.

[gnats buzz around our bench by the dirt]

This place is insane, that we’re sittin’ at. I don’t know what they are, but they’re annoying. I suggest we move. We have to get out of here. [Looks around the empty park, full of dirt and gnats.]

Yo this is so wack, what they did, I can’t even believe it. I’ve been skating this shit for over 15 years, and the only motherfuckers who ever sat back he — actually there was never no seats here — the only motherfuckers who was back here was skaters and homeless motherfuckers more or less. That was before it was all terrorist-crazy and all that, so you know. Motherfuckers used to have their little shop set-up back there in the corner. And they would just sleep and chill. Like now they got all these stupid-ass benches and shit over here. Nobody even sits on these things. Look at us, we’re the only ones here. They got a fuckin’ chess table. This shit is… just stupid, like who the fuck plays chess like this? Out in the open in the city? It’s just weeds and shit. You’ll probably get like West Nile and shit when it’s raining from the mosquitoes.

When did you first start coming here?

Oh, shit. Damn, like ‘88 maybe. Late eighties. When I first started skating, it was like these dudes on my block used to write graffiti, and they used to skate, and the name of their crew was Twisted Skates, and that shit was dope. That shit was hard to me when I was little. And they used to have these graffiti stencils on their boards. I was like damn, I wanted to write graffiti. So they used to skate around and write graffiti, I started writing graffiti and skating around.

Probably like ‘89, that was the first time I ever came to Manhattan. I came here by myself; I saw all these people skating. I just live over the bridge and shit, so I just walked over the bridge, and you used to be able to just walk down them steps and you’d be at the Banks. So motherfuckers are skating here and shit, I just seen it, I was like “Oh shit, skating!” and I just like started skating. I would come here like, not every day because I was still young, but I would come on the weekends and shit when it would be crowded. And it was just wild, skating that shit.

Brooklyn Banks Week: Steve Rodriguez Interview

July 17th, 2010 | 11:14 am | Features & Interviews | 2 Comments

Saturday links will be back on…Monday.

Interview by Ted Barrow on September 2, 2006

+++++++

I moved here in ’91. I had been skating here before, since ’86, because my mom had a store in the city, so I used to come in and skate the city.

From where?

From Jersey. From the shore. You could see the progression of the Banks from going from one of those like, Mecca spots. To me, it’s one of the four spots. You could see it going from that to it being closed down as a police parking lot, to it being renovated, once, to it being closed off when the Trade Center happened the first time, they turned it into a parking lot then. And then when 9/11 happened they said it was closed indefinitely at that point for a year. Now it’s open again, [it has] been re-furbished again. They took the top, the small banks, which totally sucks, but you have to give a little. So, I’ve seen the whole life of the spot. Since ’86, because before that I didn’t skate.

Start at the beginning.

Basically, I started skating just in New Jersey, whatever, I guess it was popular in like ’83,’84. I was actually into BMX before that, but you know…

Many of us were…

Yeah, but one of my friends skated, I was like, “Oh, let me try your board,” or whatever, I got on that shit, and ever since then have been wanting to skate.

What spots were you skating back then?

It was suburbia, so strip malls, back yard pools. One of my best friends that skated had a backyard pool. Some shit had happened and they emptied it, and that’s where we started skating pools. Basically, our inventory to set-up was some of those vert ramps down by the shore, like Carville ramp, some of those rotten parks like Jeff Jones, that was some famous skater back then, he had a skatepark. One of my friends had a weird vert ramp with weird transitions. It was all shit we skated, but what we really wanted to skate was the strip malls, and little jump ramps like that. It wasn’t something where you’d have to like, kill yourself, and it seemed like it’d be more fun, more longevity in skating.

Street skating was more accessible, and everywhere. There was this one ramp called the Gandhi ramp, I don’t know why it was called that, but it was in my town and a lot of people would go there, a lot of pros. I remember Jim Murphy going there back in the Alva days. You’d be like, “Damn, that’s Jim Muryphy!” Or Jeff Kendall or somebody. Someone would always show up there. But we honestly would skate the ramps in his driveway than the [bigger] ramp. [The Gandhi ramp] seemed like it was something that was made beyond our ability. Just dropping in and doing a kickturn on the vert, you’re just so psyched, but you had an illusion that you were a better skateboarder if you skated street, you know what I mean? I think that’s what it was, because you wanted to do tricks. It took a longer time to learn stuff on vert. It was total commitment. I mean, we did it, but you could spend all day, and almost get a frontside air, or I could learn so much shit in the streets. There was a ramp culture down by the shore, because there were bowls, and established pros who had parks, but again, it seemed for our situation, and where we grew up in the suburbs, skating the strip malls was the equivalent of skating the city.

When did you start going into Manhattan to skate?

‘86, ’87, around then. My mother owned a store that’s actually where I live now, on 6th Avenue and Bleeker, the Bird Shit Banks used to be there, or the Bleeker Banks. It was right across the street, and I had come in with her, sort of like as a summer job to help her deliver shit, and right across the street were these sick fucking banks. I have photos from ’86 skating that spot.

It kind of worked out well because I eventually moved into that building, partly because that spot was right there. I was like, “Damn, I’m going to move right here,” you know? My uncle owns the building that’s adjacent to that park, so we never got kicked out.

When did you start going to the Banks?

The Banks, was probably in ’86, when we first started coming in. I’d come in with my friends from New Jersey, and every time we’d come in, we would go skate a little further.