Queens Archives - Quartersnacks

Who Are Some of NYC’s Next Generation of Skaters? — An Interview With Elisa Martini & Alim Orahovac

Features & Interviews October 21st, 2025 · 12:00 am · 1

📝 Intro + Interview by Greg Navarro
📷 Photography by Greg Navarro

It was a windy day in Maspeth, Queens when I found Alim, 17 years old, fingerboarding at New York’s only D.I.Y. fingerboard park. “Yo, imagine I film a whole fingerboard street part, but it’s on VX1000? Ima’ change the game with that one,” he said to me. I laughed, thinking about all the tape he’d have to waste. “What you laughing at, poser?” he said to me with a grin on his face. Alim is the type of kid who says what he wants.

As we got to know each other, Alim invited me out on a few filming missions with his best friend Elisa Martini, 20 years old, a skater from Jamaica, Queens. Elisa and Alim are the youngest new members of the Bronze 56K crew. For a whole year, as Alim recovered from his ACL surgery, Elisa and him invested in a VX1000 and set out to film a video. On the morning of their video premiere, I sat down with the two friends at the Brooklyn Banks to learn more about the making of “On The Corner.”

A Bowl Grows in Queens

Daily News September 25th, 2023 · 11:56 am · 3

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?)

Farewell, JFK Banks

Daily News June 6th, 2023 · 12:00 am · 2

📷 Photo via @falconbowse

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 ;)

‘Big Shout Out To The Empanada Lady’ — An Interview With Marcello Campanello

Features & Interviews September 1st, 2021 · 12:00 am · 2

Intro + Interview by Adam Abada
Headline Image by Christopher Zipf
All Other Photography by Jason Sherman

Flushing Meadows Park’s globe looms large in New York skateboarding. It is probably the second most recognizable New York spot next to the Banks.

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.

#CourtUpdate

Daily News August 18th, 2016 · 6:07 pm

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.