Back in the fall, we were biking up to the new Bronx Skatepark, the one just over the Willis Avenue Bridge. We had seen it out of a car weeks earlier — it looked really fun — but there was little other information out there. Through some loose intel via the unintuitive Parks Department website, we arrived at the name: Golden Lady Skatepark. Random.
(Even if you search it now, a rollerblade video is the first result.)
On the trip up, somebody remarked how odd it was that a brand new concrete skatepark could just pop up in the city completely unannounced. It sat there, waiting to be noticed by people living nearby, or driving on the Bruckner or Deegan, which are the two major roadways it sits between. It was like a new street spot, asking to be discovered.
“Shouldn’t NYSkateboarding post about it?” someone said.
In fact, NYSkateboarding stopped posting anything after September 24th. And on the 2nd day of 2022, they announced that they would cease publication altogether.
NYSkateboarding launched in 2009 — when, as their closing post says — “New York content on the major skate media sites was somewhat minimal.”
But NYSkateboarding was never just an aggregator or a place to watch footy. It was perhaps the first media outlet in all of skateboarding to truly feel like a neighborhood blog. It drove home the idiom about New York being the world’s biggest small town, but specifically for skaters. It was skateboarding’s Gothamist, EV Grieve or DNA Info (R.I.P.)
They indiscriminately posted events: from youth skate meet-ups to trivia nights to premieres at outer-borough skateshops that catered to locals. They had photos of every new skatepark that sprouted up when you could still count the city’s skateparks on your fingers, and recapped all the premieres in town when New York was only beginning to take its footing as a can’t-miss stop for non-local companies.
How crazy does that sound? That once upon a time, companies would only premiere their videos in California? It wasn’t that long ago, and NYSkateboarding was there logging every flyer, every drunk afterparty photo, every new park an out-of-town company would do a prospective demo at.
There are probably people reading this who have never skated during a time when New York did not share such a large chunk of the spotlight with the west coast. At the same time, the waterfall of daily New York skate content is still a new concept to older skaters who came of age clocking their local Manhattan or Brooklyn spots in the few big videos that happened to feature them — when EST videos were a radical concept. (Our collegues at Jenkem even predict that the waterfall is maybe just a bubble.)
NYSkateboarding was a quietly massive stone on the road of bridging those two generations together. Thanks to Rick and the whole crew for all of their hard work over the years. You will be missed on every Monday Links perusal from now on ❤️
When I was 16 I emailed them a flyer for an event we were having at a DIY way upstate hours out of the city and they posted about it and sent me a package of stickers and stuff to giveaway. Good people over there
Well said
They also created the best knock off santa cruz logo ever, I still rock that shit out here in the Bay Area
sometimes it feels like theres barely any skate media left at all
thrasher and berrics on the west
jenkem and snxks on the east
obvs theres sk8 jawn, skate witches and a couple zines but thats it
Beautifully written Kosta, it is difficult to not get nostalgic reading this.
Ohhh no, not random!! The golden lady was an amazing strip club that featured a huge neon ad of a girl in a cocktail glass on the side of what is now a done-up pre-school just down the block from the park. You’d see her if you ever took the third ave bridge to avoid the toll driving north. It’s actually amazing they named the park that—I had to look it up to be sure it was official.
I am an old reader of NYskateboarding and I always love their blogs and podcast.