New York, on the other hand, is not a ledge city.
It’s a metal curb city. It’s a garbage city. It’s a cellar door city. It’s an expensive city. It’s a party city. It’s a fashionable city. But it is not, by any means, a city where you will have an easy time finding a ledge to do even a foot-long tailslide on.
We may live in a city with the highest concentration of beautiful women, but the trade-off is that we are stuck with the ugliest ledges. Ledge skating in New York is the equivalent of constantly having to go home with a two. Sure, there are plenty of tens in the Financial District, except they’ll never lend you enough time to get to know them and make some moves.
The Seaport is a constant dramedy of the absurd — almost as if its creators are aware of our ledge desperation, and gain sadistic pleasure from toying with our emotions and crooked grinds. Ziegfeld is gone. Midtown is more of a bust than ever, with its most popular ledge only reaching a foot in height. Water Street hasn’t seen a glimmer of unknobbed marble in almost a decade. Even our favorite Sunday night refuge, which we rented many a ZipCar to drive the seventy miles to, got knobbed last year.
As we reach the coldest depths of winter, let’s forget skating’s fun aspects. You’ll miss skateboarding less when you are forced to remember that it could also be terrible. Ride Channel may have oversaturated the list game (we only run maybe 1.333 lists a year anyway), but this is important: here are the ten worst ledges in New York that are skated by humans with presumably functional brains.