Yeah, it was a slow news week. Between non-site work, and something that was supposed to go live yesterday getting canceled, there hasn’t been a lot going on.
As many of you may already know, Nike has taken the reigns with New York’s Go Skate Day these past few years. You also might know that this site has minimal involvement/interest in Go Skate Day each year. However, in conjunction with the “Skate Safari” barge they built for this year’s festivities (Register here, it’s for one weekend only, and actually pretty cool because they remade the small Banks, Pyramid Ledge, etc.), they released a commemorative GSD-themed ‘zine.
In it, we had the chance to interview Bryan Chin, one of the true unsung pioneers of skateboard documentation and media in New York. He ran the first New York skateboarding website, Metrospective.com (which later became OfficialNewYork.com), and started the original “All City Skate Jam” with absolutely zero sponsors. From there, it turned into Go Skate Day / Skate Industry P.R. Day, and you know the rest of the story. It’s good to give someone the credit they have long deserved, because a lot of people even from here forget that the skate jams were initially a Metrospective/ABC Skateshop creation, not a 5Boro one. There’s also a lot of talk about the early incarnation of the skateboard internet, as Bryan was one of the first people to put skate video clips online in the mid-nineties a.k.a. a big influence on this site and every local-based site like it. Grab an issue of the ‘zine if you make it onto the barge park this weekend. Maybe it’ll get posted here one day for people who cannot get the physical ‘zine.
Have a good one. Be back next week with actual updates.
