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Category: Daily News

Sanguine Paradise

July 15th, 2019 · 1:00 am · 3 Comments

→ Please sign the petition to show your support for keeping the asphalt at the Tompkins Square Park courts. This space is as sacred to skateboarding and the East Village as the Rucker or the West 4th Street courts are to basketball. It would be a massive loss to the youth and cultural fabric of the neighborhood if they were covered with synthetic turf. We are a few hundred shy of 25,000 (!!!) signatures, so please please please share the petition with your friends, and on your respective social channels.

After many years of captivity, the Zipper Ledge is finally free and dressed with a fresh, yellow paintjob, as first reported by @mini_spots. (Don’t ask for pin! That’s like asking where the Empire State Building is!) If only the park starts opening the gate at Yellow Rail, then the entire Morningside little kid skate scene circa 2003 will be in full revival.

Jesse Alba is the latest guest on The Bunt, and really happy that he no longer lives at 51 Eldert Street.

…aanndd Max Palmer is half the man he used to be in Jesse’s new #longform iPhone edit.

One of the hardest things about interviewing skateboarders is not asking the same ten things that the last few interviews they did asked. It’s special and rare when you get someone for their first one. Caleb Barnett did his first ever interview with the Slam City Skates blog.

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#TRENDWATCH2019: Rising Sea Levels

July 11th, 2019 · 8:53 am · 16 Comments

Where there’s fire, there’s smoke — and where there’s water, there are skate spots. Skateboarding crawled out of the Pacific Ocean on a day with no waves, and its progression has largely been the work of those residing in coastal cities. From Third & Army to Southbank, waterfront property has provided an idyllic atmosphere necessary to clear the head and innovate. In fact, many New York ledge skating skills have been honed along the Seaport, a tradition that continues northward to this very summer, with the new Upper East Side ledges / manny pads becoming an IG hot spot.

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Skateboarding Is Officially Old Enough To ‘Play The Classics’

July 9th, 2019 · 2:00 am · 7 Comments

In 2006, rap came of a certain age. It was the ten-year anniversary of Jay-Z’s first album, and he celebrated it by performing the entire thing in a highly publicized Radio City Music Hall show. Rap had enough longevity and had resisted enough fads to reach a level where some of its best acts never had to record a new song again — and they’d still be able to sell out venues for the remainder of their careers. (Fwiw, Jay was “retired” at this moment.) Our culture already accepted this from the Stevie Wonders, Aretha Franklins and Billy Joels, but it was around this point that hip-hop made the turn. Jay, Kanye and Wayne can call it quits on making new music today, and still pull a Barclays Center crowd in 2039 by giving the people what they want.

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What It Do Babbyyyy

July 8th, 2019 · 1:20 am · 3 Comments

Photo via the tumbleweeds. Tumblr in 2019 is like that one ledge spot that was popping five years ago. Everyone used to meet there, get clips there, get stuck there. Now it’s chunked up, the bevel got as round as Blubba, and it sorta just sits there. Maybe a group of guys in their 30s will skate it for 20 minutes before they go to the bar. Maybe a pair of kids in #curated thrift store finds visiting from out of town will film each other do two-trick lines for their trip edit on it. The solitary man who shows up after work once every two weeks to ensure that he hasn’t lost his back tails is always a fixture. But sometimes, all three of those end up there together, and it’s fun — not fun like the old days, but enough to remind you that they existed ;)

NBC visited Tompkins to speak with Zhu and Yaje about how much that square of asphalt means to the community. Please sign the petition to preserve Tompkins Square courts as an asphalt space, if you have yet to do so.

The Canal boys have a new video coming out this fall :)

Medium has an awesome feature with Justin Bohl, a guy who has been the go-to tour guide for skate teams visiting Detroit over the past eight years. He put together a twenty-minute video entitled Mint, which features a bunch of behind the scenes footage of all the traveling skaters who have come through the city as it became sought-after skate trip destination in the 2010s.

“Ultra” from Chris Burt is up there with the Bos brothers’ “Wide Open” for 2019’s best videos outside of the Thrasher/Insta content spiral. It’s a Minnesota video with three parts, mostly filmed in the suburbs, yet somehow feels all the right ways different than a lot of the other stuff you’ve watched this past week. Ender part from Frog’s Pat Gallaher.

The New York Times has a quick profile of Alexis Sablone.

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