There isn’t exactly an abundance of video coverage for New York in the late-eighties and early-nineties. There’s obviously Vallely’s Rubbish Heap part, and Matt Hensley in Full Power Trip (and I guess the NYC section in Future Primitive, but 1985 isn’t the late-eighties…feel free to include links to anything that may have been missed in the comments), but none of those guys are actually from New York. Even the Deathbowl documentary glossed over this period, only tackling it from the “history of Shut” angle.
Well, God bless all the neglected storage spaces throughout New York. NY Skateboarding posted Apple Juice, a mini-documentary by Skate NYC, a skate shop that was in operation from 1986 to 1990 on Avenue A and 9th, which happened to be stored away in some dusty box for years. It’s not exactly a full-fledged skate video, but a previously unseen look, at least from a cultural standpoint, at what skateboarding in downtown New York looked like at the onset of the nineties. Features Harold Hunter, Jon Carter, and others, with a variety of locations no longer with us, including the World Trade Center, The Brooklyn Banks, and the original three-stair ledge version of the Fuji Building on 52nd Street and Park.
“All these kids, they have such fear about getting older, and they’re so happy being fourteen or fifteen. Boy, that is such a distinction from when I was a kid. All we wanted to do is get older, we couldn’t do anything out our age. These guys have a whole world that is defined on every level by what they do, and the only fear of getting older is that you’re going to lose what you have now.”
Check out the feature on NY Skateboarding for more images and history on Skate NYC.
Priceless.