Time Capsule | Quartersnacks

Permanently the Best Little Kid Skater of All Time

Time Capsule May 9th, 2012 · 11:32 am · 9

48 Blocks has been posting an all-Pier 7 video by Brad Johnson over the past two weeks. Highlights include Marcus McBride doing every plausible flip trick over the blocks, Rob Welsh being a #phatstylez icon, Young Stevie almost attempting a boneless, and Lavar McBride reminding everyone that he will forever be the best little kid skater. No, it doesn’t matter how many kids today can nollie flip back tail (or 1080) before they can buy cigarettes.

As a companion piece to the Pier 7 video, here’s Lavar’s part from S.F’s Greatest Misses, also a Brad Johnson creation (while we’re at it, he’s also responsible for one of skateboarding’s greatest party parts.) It’s a compilation video released in 2006 that encompasses the late-EMB days through the Pier 7 / Union Square era. The mid-nineties Cellski track also cares to remedy the underutilization of classic Bay Area rap in Bay Area skate parts, an issue we’re still dealing with today.

It has been on YouTube for five years, but the quality is trash. Here’s a cleaned up version. Oh, and here’s a link to watch Trilogy, just in case.

Chapman House R.I.P.

Time Capsule April 11th, 2012 · 9:43 am · 4

Name brand New York skate houses are a dying breed. The Green Diamond no longer bears the green awning after which it was named, many prominent Dobbin Block personalities have moved on, and only one of the residents at 21 Spring Street maintains an interest in skateboarding. As of March 31, the Chapman House in Long Island City is no more. The property was bought out by a holding company, and all of the residents were forced out.

42-68 Hunter Street began as a home base for the Chapman team during the Short Ends days (the video that featured Jake Johnson’s first part.) Almost five years have passed since its release — Brendan Leddy is in the U.S. Air Force, Luke Malaney is currently on a half-year-plus hike from Georgia to Maine, and Jake, as you may know, is a pro skateboarder. Justin White’s New Thirsty video was also born out of this three-bedroom apartment. While filming for it, Jersey Dave willingly spent every weekend sleeping on the kitchen floor, even if there were beds or couches available. Miles Marquez lived out a considerable portion of his hick phase in this house, and even the current incarnation of Quartersnacks (i.e. the consistently updated one you see today) was built out of the apartment during a 2010 sublet. It was the crash site for dozens after late-night midtown sessions, or the next best thing to sleeping outside after staying at Enid’s too late (a 15-minute skate down McGuinness and across the Pulsaki Bridge.) Most of those times never wound up on video or in photos.

No one knows if the building is getting torn down or gutted out, but it will likely take a turn towards the “renewed” face that Long Island City had adopted during those five years. There’s no chance a couple skateboarders would be able to afford rent there again.

Below, is the full Short Ends video, and a bunch of photos of / around the house by Jason “Negative” Lecras.

This Is What Skate Shoes Looked Like Ten Years Ago

Time Capsule April 4th, 2012 · 10:34 am · 41

(Click to enlarge. Thanks to Alex Dymond for the mags from which the scans come from.)

The gratuitous air bubble is an oft-overlooked entry on the “Worst Trends in Skateboarding” list.

It’s easy to get nostalgic for classic shoes from the past. We have fond recollections of the éS Koston 1s (one of the few times the air bubble “worked”) and the Lakai Staple (even if our memories tend to slim their bulky construction down a bit), but forget that they had to co-exist with some of the ugliest shoes known to man. More often than not, the prototypical late-90s / early-2000s moon boot began with an air bubble. The Osiris D3 was the most notorious of the bunch, but there are other equally hideous offenders that we tend to forget about.

This infographic is from a 2001 issue of Stance, which was Transworld’s short-lived shot at a “lifestyle” magazine a la Complex. It accompanies an article that breaks down Jordan Brand’s use of air bubbles in basketball shoes, and is meant to illustrate how “air technology” made its way into skateboarding.

Today, it provides an overview of just how insane the average skate shoe looked back then, not to mention clues as to why half of these companies aren’t around anymore. It worked for the Koston 1 and Reynolds 1, but it didn’t work for a whole lot of others. People don’t come to terms with the absurdity of most trends until long after they pass, so there’s nothing wrong with us admitting we were psyched on a few of these back when they came out.

Thank God there are kids comfortable with jumping down 15 sets in Old Skools and Janoskis nowadays, right? Without them, people would still think that air bubble has a reason to exist. Shout out to the Dunk / Jordan 1, the Half-Cab, and the Chuck Taylor.

Scanner File: Huf, Pang, Ponte, Steve R., Jones Keefe

Time Capsule February 22nd, 2012 · 10:18 am · 8

Once The Chrome Ball Incident came around and monopolized the scanner-based skate site game, posts of old magazine scans became somewhat unnecessary. That’s why there hasn’t been one since November 2010. But after watching those R.B. Umali “Shoot All Skaters” episodes, it’s hard not to get nostalgic for more nineties east coast images, so we dug into a stack of old magazines to look for things that the internet’s leading skate magazine scanners have yet to unearth. Special thanks goes to Alex Dymond, as he donated the stack of mags depicted above, which included an October 1998 copy of The Source (ATCQ break-up issue.)

The following five interviews are from Fridge, which was an occasionally free magazine from the late-nineties. Its content was maybe 40% skateboarding (often east coast-centric), 20% snowboarding, 35% music, and 5% other stuff. It’s amazing that just ten years ago, people actually put money into *printing* magazines based on somewhat inconsistent interests. There was somehow an audience for a magazine that would interview Keith Hufnagel and Larry Holmes, provide a guide to shitty craft beers and snowboard boots, and review Less Than Jake, Björk and M.O.P. albums alongside one another all in the same issue (which, by the way, literally had a clown on the cover.) Nowadays, if you want to talk about, say, skateboarding, the Knicks, Atlanta rap, a concrete baseball diamond in the East Village, and a bunch of rich girl hangouts on the westside of Manhattan in one place, you pay $10 for a domain name and start a website.

Police Informer Blogspot R.I.P. Shout to the Skate.ly ad archive. All images are enlargeable.

Essential Viewing

Time Capsule February 15th, 2012 · 2:22 pm · 3

Must Watch: R.B. Umali “Shoot All Skaters” — Part 2. (Part 1 here.)

Tackles various topics: Stussy Asia tour (back when Stussy had AVE, Huf, Scott Johnston, Danny Montoya, etc. all on one team), never deleting Gino footage, the Javitz double set, Kalis v.s. Pyramid Ledges, Kalis v.s. the Banks wall, Zered v.s. the Nassau rail, Zered v.s. Grace Ledge.

Shout out to Fred Gall and Josh Kalis for wearing camo pants when skating Pyramid Ledges. Shout out to to the guy who edited this for using Horace Silver as the backdrop of the last section.