Diagram via Charles Rivard, PhD.
Gaps between generations have seemingly insignificant signifiers. For instance, a lot of people now in their teens or even early twenties have lived lives where landlines were a mere novelty. They never had to call their friend’s house and ask for them to be put on the phone (“Stacy can’t talk now, she’s grounded.”) Spending even a few years in landline purgatory, dealing with the anxiety of the unknown on the other end, helped shape your personality in one way or another. We like to think that it helped us relate to people older than us in a closer way than those 5-7 years our junior.
The same could be said of those currently in their late-twenties/early-thirites and spots in New York. Though the much mythologized “Banks during the day, Astor in between, midtown all night”-days never happened for us, we know what it’s like to, you know, at one point have skated a row of marble ledges in lower Manhattan that you didn’t get kicked out of. Kids who grew up meeting at 12th & A or even L.E.S. Park don’t know what that’s like. Those days are a decade back in the past. On the flipside, when a twenty-year-old responds to your “Where you at?” text with “This spot on Mott and Prince,” you know not to get excited because it means they’re more than likely skating a spoonful of asphalt to a traffic barrier.
That midway point gives us a decent perspective upon which to observe the current state of “spots” in New York. Unlike the Dogg Pound, the #tfreport hashtag has not been active. Thus we are sad to announce that there is no “Year in T.F. Obstacles” for this year (previously: 2014, 2013, 2012.) Instead, the QS Twitter began compiling a visual journal of the stuff that people skated, sorta tried to skate, sorta kinda considered skating, or sorta kinda only joked about skating throughout 2015.
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