The 2025 Quartersnacks Year in Review: 5-1

As of the 31st, MetroCards go the way of subway tokens.

The next step for Quartersnacks: outlive OMNY.

Let’s wrap this thing up.

Previously: 25-16, 15-6.

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5) Coles’ 5050 on Christie Street

We are all worse off as a city after Coles moved down to Atlanta, but like a wise man once said: “Teach a man how to fish …don’t be mad when he gets some fish.”

While we muster up the will it takes to move on, he luckily touched base up here a few times over the course of filming for Melodi’s Wasting Time video, pulling off what has to be the most unlikely 5050 in recent memory. People wallie these things, they boardslide them, but both trucks across damn-near four sections and a third of a block is insane.

4) Ben K’s CBS 5050

Wait, maybe you disregard that whole thing we said earlier about 2025 being about boardslides — was the year actually about frontside 5050s? Ben returning to the scene of his early Hockey vid boardslide / Suciu Thrasher cover trick to grind something head high, at an uncomfortable angle, and with no absolute certainty that the rail will hold (the one beside it broke and was removed) was a shocking way to end one of 2025’s best video parts. One that was, yeah, actually, otherwise full of crazy boardslides.

3) Karim on the Big Screen Outside MSG / Q.S.S.O.T.Y.

Rooting for Karim is one of the easiest things in the world, and this past August, it got even easier because his nosepick at the Banks adorned the big screen around the corner from The World’s Most Famous Arena™.

A young Queens legend who’s been putting it down since the Tombo days at 5Boro — when he was still kickflip front crooking down handrails — is teammates with the Olympic Gold Medalist in skateboarding. Makes you smile just thinking about it ❤️

It feels timely to make a longwinded NBA Cup analogy in light of what transpired on Tuesday night, and while it’s not the Larry O’Brien trophy, it’s not a tre flip down El Toro, and it’s not S.O.T.Y. — Karim is Q.S.S.O.T.Y. and the Knicks won the NBA Cup.

2) Hardies D7 Jam

When Ian Browning wrote about the onslaught of A-tier videos that made August 2023 one of the most memorable months in skateboard history, he mentioned “a nineties skater version of the meme about how eating a bag of Takis would overwhelm and kill a child from the 19th century.”

For this impromptu best trick jam that Tyshawn Jones and Hardies threw at D7 in June, you don’t even have to go back that far. Imagine a skater from twenty years ago, when guys like Kerel Roach and Nolan Lee were first hucking 180s and kickflips down these steps, witnessing the shit that went down here in a mere hour. TJ Rogers alone mined a dense scroll of A.B.D’s to scratch fakie bigspin, switch front 3 and switch pop shove off the remaining tally.

In 2004? Skateboarding probably would’ve ended right then and there.

1) The Big Banks

Another year, another obvious #1.

The most common conversation point this year has been: “Have you been to The Banks yet?”

Given the delays, rumors, and scares (if you recall, during the COVID summer, it looked like this spot was gone forever) — it is absolutely surreal that Gotham Park, Steve Rodriguez, Vans, The Skatepark Project, and everyone else involved in this pulled it off. Not even that, they managed to unlock the western zone of the Banks that are a few feet shorter than the big boys that have historically been skated down towards the ten-stair, which almost immediately became the part that everyone skated the most.

And why do people skate the smaller big banks the most?

Well, that’s because the second most common conversation point this year has been: “Wow, this spot is really fucking hard to skate?”

Unlike Southbank, Love Park, Muni and other landmarks that have been restored into sanctioned functionality, our marquee spot is an absolute work-out, as evidenced by the frustrations of even our most talented colleagues. But it builds character. (And at least it’s clean now.) After all, this city has to root for the Knicks 🏀