A Short History of New York’s Longest Lines

Ricky Oyola, godfather of the east coast “filming a line via just skating random shit on the street”-practice, once expounded on his peak skateboard dream: doing a line through Philadelphia’s then-standing City Hall, into the street, up into the Municipal Services building, back down the stairs, across the street, into Love Park, through Love Park, and end at Wawa.

The closest he got on record was a line from the end of City Hall, through the intersection, and into Love Park in Eastern Exposure 2, but it did establish a lingering precedent for connecting spots. Apart from Ricky and that Joey O’Brien Sabotage 4 line where he starts at Love and ends up in the garage beneath it, spot connecting does not have a rich history in Philadelphia.

Or anywhere, really — because doing a line from one spot, through the street, and to another, is fucking hard. There are variables (people, traffic, pebbles, maybe two sets of security, acts of God), and a pressing anxiety of missing the final trick in an already-long line, which gets amplified by the fact that fifteen other things went right up until that point. As you will soon learn, spot connecting is something most people do for the sake of doing it. In the majority of cases, they stick to their safe tricks.

Like Philadelphia, New York is a dense and layered city. Many of its streets are narrow, and depending on where you are, three or four spots could be across from one another. New York never had a “Big Three,” but it does have three different types of benches on four different street corners, and over the years, skateboarders here have kept their third eyes open and far-sighted.

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The End Was Actually The Beginning — The Year in Ride Channel Headlines

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One of 2016’s greatest exercises in predicting the future was the Slap message board’s “Ride Channel Article Title Predictions” thread, which made its way to Monday Links back in January. It included brilliant projections like:

Dane Burman quit all his sponsors and now rides for Anti Hero
Zero to Hero real quick

This guy snorted a line of cocaine and then crooked grinded a 12 stair rail
This will blow your mind

Ishod has mysteriously stopped putting out footage
Wair could he be???

Isle Skateboards drastically changes up their team
Cleanup on Isle 6

One of the DGK pro’s is getting married this weekend
Here comes the McBride

Some say Ride Channel is the skateboarding BuzzFeed; others have called it our Fox News (that claim might be disqualified as the same source called QS the equivalent of The Drudge Report — by far the most offensive statement ever made about this website.) We contend that The Ride Channel is actually skateboarding’s HipHopDX, in that it is a website that will write about absolutely anything.

There is no finer destination for the daily happenings of the skateboard world to be condensed into date-headline-subhead. While many of Slap’s title predictions unfortunately fell short of reality, there is a saying about how truth is stranger than fiction (an idiom that would make a great Ride Channel subhead, actually.)

Well, this happened: on the eve of the internet’s annual list season, we present the year in real Ride Channel headlines.

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The Ten Worst Ledges in New York City

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New York, on the other hand, is not a ledge city.

It’s a metal curb city. It’s a garbage city. It’s a cellar door city. It’s an expensive city. It’s a party city. It’s a fashionable city. But it is not, by any means, a city where you will have an easy time finding a ledge to do even a foot-long tailslide on.

We may live in a city with the highest concentration of beautiful women, but the trade-off is that we are stuck with the ugliest ledges. Ledge skating in New York is the equivalent of constantly having to go home with a two. Sure, there are plenty of tens in the Financial District, except they’ll never lend you enough time to get to know them and make some moves.

The Seaport is a constant dramedy of the absurd — almost as if its creators are aware of our ledge desperation, and gain sadistic pleasure from toying with our emotions and crooked grinds. Ziegfeld is gone. Midtown is more of a bust than ever, with its most popular ledge only reaching a foot in height. Water Street hasn’t seen a glimmer of unknobbed marble in almost a decade. Even our favorite Sunday night refuge, which we rented many a ZipCar to drive the seventy miles to, got knobbed last year.

As we reach the coldest depths of winter, let’s forget skating’s fun aspects. You’ll miss skateboarding less when you are forced to remember that it could also be terrible. Ride Channel may have oversaturated the list game (we only run maybe 1.333 lists a year anyway), but this is important: here are the ten worst ledges in New York that are skated by humans with presumably functional brains.

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2014 New York Skateboarding Year in Review: 25-21

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(The list series formerly known as “The Events That Defined New York Skateboarding in 20__”)

If you started reading our award-winning skateboard website in 2014, we should inform you that every December, we turn the mundane into the fantastic by counting down the moments that shaped skateboarding in this fine city throughout the past twelve months. They are listed in rough order of importance, depending on how you define the word “important.” A fun way to reminisce for those who were there, and a way to get informed for those who were not. Enjoy ;)

Previously…2013: 25-21, 20-16, 15-11, 10-6, 5-1 / 2012: 25-21, 20-16, 15-11, 10-6, 5-1 / 2011: 25-21, 20-16, 15-11, 10-6, 5-1 / 2010: 25-21, 20-16, 15-11, 10-6, 5-1

25. The Grease Banks

We begin our year-end countdown with where we began last year: skate deterrents. Where would we be if not for those who try to stop us?

We’re accustomed to having buckets of water poured on us by people who live above diamond-plate skate spots, or eggs thrown at us by kids out of project windows. Hell, in Barcelona, we saw someone throw bleach from a window on a drunk crowd of skateboarders outside a bar. But this fall, after becoming an accidental neighbor with Chinatown’s latest bank spot, a restaurant poured kitchen grease all over the obstacle of interest, which — short of maybe smearing shit all over a spot — is the most hateful skate deterrent of all time, especially in less-detectable low light.

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The Greatest Guest Tricks in Skate Video History

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(Plus their guest verse in a rap song counterparts.)

As America’s premier inventions, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that both rap and skateboarding have similarities. For example, guest verses on rap songs and guest tricks in parts virtually operate in the same exact way: they start careers, they rejuvenate careers, give way to friendly competition on the same spot/beat, and sometimes, they simply provide material for the nerds to nerd out over.

…and yes, this is maybe the nerdiest thing ever posted on this website.

Putting your team on is the most hip-hop shit you could do in any realm of life, even if it often results in bankruptcy. We dug through the rich dual histories of putting other dudes on your song, and other dudes in your video part, seeking comparisons whenever they were applicable. This is rather Transworld video heavy because they embraced the power of the cameo far more than other institutions. Think of them as the Hypnotize Camp or Wu-Tang of skate videos…or something.

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