Last month of 2020. Pour yourself a drink.
Let’s get this show on the road ♥
Last Year: The 2019 Year in Review
Tag: Indoor Ten
The Resurrection of Indoor Ten
Not exactly sure how current this news item is, as much of the office is off in Europe filming for our future award-winning tour video, 56 Tricks.
Nonetheless, one of our spot scouts (that’s the department responsible for the spots page not being updated for 4+ years) recently passed along visual confirmation of New York’s most famous indoor set of stairs’ rebirth. Disregard our earlier report from February, or at least the finite tone in which it was written.
The *new* Indoor Ten doesn’t have a sleek, white marble surface like it’s predecessor. It’s made up of the the mundane and bleak granite found in nearly every midtown Manhattan train station. It’s more narrow, with less runway. It’s actually probably maybe bigger — going fast and rolling off it may no longer be an option like it was during its earlier incarnation.
It is, however, an indoor set of stairs. It’s loud. It’s crowded. It’s inside a subway station. You will get kicked out. You will only get two tries if you’re lucky. You will get chased for skating it. Maybe if fortune is truly on your side, you’ll get arrested for skating a set of ten stairs. It’s everything we could ever want.
It’s just great to have it back where it belongs.
(The only question that remains is if the A.B.D. scroll has been refreshed…e.g. the last high-profile trick at Indoor Ten 1.0 was Tyshawn’s switch backside flip in “cherry” — is switch backside flip off limits, or do skateboarding’s data-mining statisticians approach this development as an entirely new set of stairs?)
Goodbye, Friend: A Eulogy For Indoor Ten
Though Indoor Ten has been under construction for over a year, the MTA recently revealed the new entrance to the F train on 42nd Street. It does not look like the much beloved midtown institution will remain with us.
It was 2002. Flip’s Sorry video had just come out. When there was a finite number of skate videos, every nuance became etched in your pre-adolescent brain. You spent time with videos, memorized them, and mimicked them. It wasn’t only the tricks the pros did, or the occasional impression of “Fred’s gay outfit.” Something as mundane as an indoor set of stairs became something to aspire to. Sorry had a few sets of [presumably foreign] indoor stairs.
Two years earlier, Brian Wenning and Anthony Pappalardo revolutionized the way we saw big, fancy steel trashcans — not the wire ones, but ones like they had at Love. Pushing a can against a ledge taller than it validated skating a gap that wasn’t a gap.
And so, the Beer Bar green can gap was born: a five-foot tall ledge with a four-and-a-half foot tall can after it. All you had to do is not go slow, roll off the end, take the impact, and you’d make it. Beer Bar became the new hub for thirteen-year-old skateboarders in New York City. Learned a new trick? “Try it over the can.” There was only one can that mattered.