Waxing Ledges Is Contagious

A broken clock is right twice a day, and sometimes, Instagram subverts its mission of giving you AI shit that you didn’t ask for and shows a months-old nosegrind worthy of attention.

But of the millions of miles nosegrinded across the world in a given day, why this particular April 2025 Soo Saxton nosegrind shuv?

Because throughout this ledge’s nearly twenty-year lifespan, it had been a sponge anytime somebody tried to wax it.

The first assumption was that this nosegrind was another piece of artificial intelligence slop served up by the algorithm, devoid of the real world’s laws of wax.

This marble oasis was made all the more frustrating by the fact that it looks like a perfect ledge. Great height, smooth ground, wide enough for manny tricks, and the refreshing breeze of sewage wafting over from the nearby sanitation pier.

A marble ledge and the sweet smell of garbage. What more could you ask for?

Well for years, the thing you could ask for, is for it to actually grind.

Generations of waxers ruined their manicures rubbing candles into this thing, all in hopes of a 5050 across. Maybe they were lucky and got a couple going. But even if they did — they’d return with their dumbass friends, giddy with the prospect of a “new” ledge breaking up the monotony of a Saturday morning “where should we skate” argument — it was almost as if the ledge’s stubborn corner had never come in contact with wax by the next sesh.

But how did it happen?

To explain the present, we must look to the past.

It was summer 2022, already a year removed from the “hot vax summer” of 2021 and the loosening of COVID lockdowns. Mark Suciu was the reigning S.O.T.Y. and the zeitgeist was giving ledges. The euphorically low-bust city of 2020 had returned to baseline levels of kick-out. Midtown’s I Am Legend era had come to a close.

Our slate of available spots reverted to the mean. And like sampling a breakbeat that has been sampled thousands of times before, skaters began to look for new ways to position old spots.

Hot wax summer ensued.

Perhaps ~16 years after Columbus Circle had been renovated, a skater known for skating really fast and a guy who films him skating really fast brought the longest expanse of ledge within the plaza to skateable condition for the first time ever. Prior to this, people were fine skating the single-slab corners of the monument, but these two geniuses — in a testament to the power of brain cells — remembered the friskiest combination since Red Bull and vodka. That’s right baby, steel stick and rub brick! It was almost comical that it took this long.

Right away, it became one of the most-skated ledges in Manhattan, despite sitting under all of our stupid noses for nearly two decades.

This is where the contagion spread. Two blocks west, in front of a Fordham University dorm building, sat a curved marble ledge that hadn’t been skated since Vinny Ponte (!) 5050ed (!!) it in THE ~SECOND~ ZOO YORK VIDEO (?!?!) It had not been skated since the year that Europe introduced the Euro as its currency.

What happened the following winter at this dusty ledge that sat untouched since the Y2K panic? Wax! Steel stick! Nike videos! Asics day in the life edits! Guys from Atlanta dipping smith grinds!

The wax bonanza had spread so much that the building bolted stainless steel ashtrays in front of the ledge. Doesn’t everyone just Zyn and vape now, anyway?

And yet, the final boss awaited. Contagion continued to spread westward towards the Hudson River this spring, three years after hot wax summer.

We do not know what kind of pact with the devil was made to get this thing going. We do not know how many souls must burn for these nosegrinds.

But we do know one thing: the ledge goes.

Much like the disorienting “we’re skating Times Square” texts we’d send our friends on summer weekdays during COVID, it is no longer a stretch to find your crew at this ledge that had only otherwise been known as fool’s gold.

(And like those very same texts that pinpoint to a specific glitch in the skateboard matrix, let this be a reminder to you that spot apocalypses are also contagious. See: Water Street, 2024.)

So next time you skate: wax a ledge. Build a better future for the skaters of tomorrow ;)