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.