Bridges play an outsize role in skateboarding. Whether its the Brooklyn [Bridge] Banks, the I-95 overpass that covers FDR Skatepark, or the Burnside Bridge, we have extracted infinite joy from the fact that the powers-that-be generally do not give a shit about what you do under a bridge.
And no bridge has risen to such rapid prominence in skateboarding as the new Kosciuszko Bridge, which was completed in 2017. (If someone had a gun to your head and made you spell “Kosciuszko” out loud, you’re a goner too, right?)
After some loose intel, and now with photo confirmation, we can report that the JFK Banks at Kennedy Airport Terminal 6 are in the midst of getting demolished, as part of a wider $4.2 billion renovation of the terminal.
The JFK Banks have the distinction of being one of the earliest New York skate spots to appear in a widely-circulated skate video — in the era when there were like, yaknow, two videos a year ;)
Just like the eye-catching blue ground at the globe, it was hard to remember where I first noticed Marcello Campanello’s skating. His movements tempt me to use descriptors often left to non-skateboarding journalists: whirling, spinning, twisting, leaping. I noticed him in local projects, namely: Canal videos, and then saw him popping up in Diego Donival’s project Goodily. With the help of Instagram, I knew he was an Astoria Park staple, but I didn’t know much else. It wasn’t surprising, though, when he surfaced on Karl Watson’s Maxallure board brand. Now, designing graphics for Maxallure and with a stockpile of clips, is as good a time as any to find out more.
Since the early 2000s, skateboarding in New York has been forcefully pushed out of marble bench-lined public spaces and into fenced-in basketball courts — so much that we began to overtake the ballplayers themselves. As we’ve now been pushed into skateparks throughout this past decade, even the courts are becoming a novelty.
Vernon-Jackson has long been one of the best spots in the city that everyone would always forget about. Strained for ideas on where to go skate at 2 on a Wednesday and sensing the “ok fuck it let’s do nothing”-point of 4 P.M. closing in, there has seldom been a resistant voice to taking the twenty-minute train ride from downtown to skate an straight fucking ledge that you don’t get kicked of, one stop into Queens.
Vernon-Jackson isn’t gone, but those pink [straight fucking] ledges that are becoming an endangered species are, and the rub-bricked concrete ledge behind the basketball hoop is a big question mark. The iconic little kid spot — the frontside-for-regular metal bench over the ledge — remains and will slowly fade into obscurity as kids begin skating ten-stair handrails ten months into skateboarding. May we forever remember the pink ledges as being home to one of the most low impact moments of Chris Cole’s high impact career as a pre-gothic skateboarder.
On another note, the absolute worst spot to emerge from the 2000s court-ization of New York skateboarding and one of the worst ledges in city limits may potentially never see the light of 2017.
The Jackson Playground ledge was a surefire sign that your attempt at skateboarding in a given day was a complete failure. You didn’t even make it to Columbus Park. You opted to spend a precious 45 minutes of your time on earth with a concrete piece of shit. It’s bourgeois to say fuck this place because some kid in Iowa would probably sell his little brother into cruel child labor to have this thing, but fuck this place. Bye.
Throughout the VHS and DVD skate video era, the brunt of the work put into the few New York full-lengths that existed was at the helm of New Jerseyians, Long Islanders and ex-pats.
Then, Flipmode came along — a crew of virtually sponsorless (unless you’re counting Shut or Official flow) Queens kids who grew up skating the Forrest Park Bandshell and Flushing Meadows Park. They became the first group of dominantly-actually-from-a-New-York-City-borough kids to make a rewatchable, hour-long skate video.
On this day, exactly ten years ago, Suck My Flipmode A.K.A. Flipmode 3: The First Flipmode Video (the first two had low circulation on VHS tapes among friends) premiered on the screen in front of Supreme. In 2006, a skatepark meant either Mullaly’s, Riverside, Owl’s Head or recycled plastic ramps under the Manhattan Bridge. The Banks were still semi skateable. iPhones didn’t exist, and everyone found out about the premiere on Myspace. YouTube was in its first year of existence, and Official New York was on the way out. New York was also far from occupying its current day status as the second home of the skate industry, April thru September.
Skateboarding in New York, up until that point, was a grown-ups only club. You could tag along on their sessions if they liked you, but you never truly belonged. Their footage would either get hoarded, sent out to video mags, or if lucky, end up in the few full-length artifacts from the era (those ABC videos, Lurkers 1 & 2…that’s about it.) The average age in Flipmode was ~17-18, and it exceeded the natives-only litmus test unlike any of those other videos. It also helped that it got co-signs from those same older guys, as New York still had a lingering us-v.s.-them line drawn between our generation, and the generation of dudes who were around for all the shit from the 90s that people today still *ahhhh* over.
It might be forgotten in a sea of solo jazz cups now, but it was a truly a watershed moment for below-drinking-age skateboarding in New York — an initial building block in the brick maze Windows 95 screensaver empire known as Bronze 56k.
Thank you Peter. Thank you Jimmy Marketti, Billy, X, Leo, Joseph, Ryan O’Donnell, Drippy, Pedro, and Derrick — by the way, my post got over 800 likes. What’s up with the comeback part?
