Blubba is approaching two decades as a marquee American skate obstacle. Spots don’t often last twenty years in our rapid progression, 7-Year-Old Girls Can Heelflip Down Stairs-era. If they do, people begin to run out of ideas.
The noseslide wasn’t the first trick to get documented down Black Hubba — the honors belong to A.V.E. and Pat Corcoran with a front tail and a front 5-0, respectively. A noseslide down Blubba has, however, been a rite of passage for little kid skateboarders in New York since the early 2000s. If you didn’t do it by sixteen, you might as well abandon your dreams and get into cars or weed, right? ;)
Since A.V.E. and Pat initiated the spot, the evolution of how it is skated has been non-stop. Billy Rohan kicked off switch skating and flip-ins on it by the time Alphabet City dropped, and treating it as an ollie-up bank spot was always a common alternative. Ten years later, people got sick of skating on it, and started rattling off tricks over it. And you can’t forget that Westgate ushered in an entire wave of psychopaths skating up it in 2009. By this time last year, interns at Summer Trip To New York planning firms across the globe were scouring their A.B.D. spreadsheets, looking for something new to suggest to their hometown heroes. The pickings were slim.
There’s a reason the noseslide is respected as the building block of modern skateboarding. Where we begin is where we end up; the once most fundamental trick down Blubba is now the springboard for a subversive breed of skating on it.