The bountiful approaches to riding a skateboard in New York — from digging for an untapped morsel of crust and rub-bricking it, to never leaving Blue Park — will ebb and flow in popularity as time wears on. A few laid off security guards or a mere propped tile are capable of creating a sea change in the culture.
But through all those changes, there has been one constant, and that’s midtown footage. Dig as far back as the 1980s, and you’ll see people skating down that very same 47th Street hill beside the FedEx building that the dudes in Tanner Diamond‘s great new “OTIS” montage are.