The 90s | Quartersnacks

Trade Deadline

Daily News February 17th, 2014 · 5:45 am · 7

noodles

Yoooooo, obvs we out, but summer on Friday 4real.

#Surfboard Vines had a good run, but they’re officially done. This guy won.

Holy switch hardflip. Anyone else feel tempted to go buy a pink crewneck now?

Even in winter, the most productive skate crew in New York is still putting out three-minute montages. Fashion goes in cycles, so it makes sense that people are skating Verizon Banks again, albeit between hundreds of knobs.

It’s awesome that Chrome Ball never really shut down; it still has better interviews than everywhere else. The latest post-faux-mortem installment is with Reese Forbes, one of the most frequent recipients of “You had to see him skate in real life to really get it“-honors. Also, these ads were great.

Before you get too nostalgic about the nineties…(BTW, Blind jeans are back.)

A new part from history’s most prolific half cab boardslider, Jersey Dave.

Any clip with a Z-Ro song in it gets an automatic post. Still waiting for someone to skate to this…

“Snowboarders, like, see the world differently, dude.”

The new all-night, short sleeve heavy montage from the Haha Funtime crew is going to make you really sad about the state of outdoor activity right now.

New Albany-centric video from Jeremy Jordan and friends.

Still Scummin’ is a cool 40-minute bro cam video of Jersey dudes skating around known haunts of the New York region. Austin Kanfoush’s part did it justice, but it’s perfectly reasonable to use “Fuck That Shit” in every single skate video that gets put out for the remainder of skateboarding’s existence.

ICYMI: Just like Robocop (or something?), Traffic Skateboards got rebooted. They have a new montage out that features Luke Malaney footage :)

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: Gotta be Waiters v.s. Hardaway J.R. in the rookie-sophomore game.

Quote of the Week: “I never thought switch skating was going to catch on. I’d tell people they’re better off investing their money in laser discs.” — Justin Barnes

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metro boomin

Beanies are sold out until next winter. Thanks to anyone out there wearing one xoxo.

Eric Koston NYC Cruiser Footage – Circa 1995

Time Capsule November 23rd, 2012 · 1:34 pm

To wrap up this mildly Girl/Chocolate themed week, here is a quick clip of Koston cruising around downtown circa 1995-ish, via the B-roll tapes from his Epicly Later’d series that came out earlier this year. Not much by way of actual “tricks,” just cruiser footage from the area around C.I.A. Ledge and the road that surrounded the Twin Towers (to the side of where the white stone benches were.) Thanks to Chris and the crew at VBS for sharing this with us. The audio is jacked in a few places, but you can deal with it. Have a good weekend.

Loosely Related (from two years earlier):

The Zoo York Institute of Design

Time Capsule May 31st, 2012 · 10:11 am · 15

In the introduction to his interview with Zered Bassett, Chris Nieratko details how Zoo York was once a source of pride for east coast skaters. A few buyouts and a decade later, nobody sets up a Zoo board with a geographic bias in mind anymore. Even if the company completely phases out of skating, people will forever nerd out over their first three videos (Mixtape, at this point, is just as much of a hip-hop classic a la Wild Style or Style Wars as a classic skate video), and chances are, most who began skating after Zoo ceased being any sort of an east coast status symbol have seen those videos and cried about how all the spots are gone.

You can’t type “zoo york ads” into a Vimeo search bar and get any results, so a lot of younger kids won’t see the old Zoo ads. (They probably won’t see the new ones either…do kids still look at magazines?) Those ads are just as full of classic nineties east coast iconography as the original videos.

The Zoo ads throughout the nineties were HIP-HOP at a time when that meant more than leaving comments about how Lil’ Wayne sucks on every pre-2000 rap video’s YouTube page. Other companies even jocked their whole hip-hop scrapbook vibe when it was appropriate: Transworld styled article layouts for east coast skaters with Zoo’s look (see here), west coast companies would run Zoo-esque ads for their east coast riders (see here and here), and start-up east coast brands like Illuminati, Metropolitan, and Capital all had a bit of Zoo DNA in their ads. It’s unfortunate that now, even when paired with a sick photo, Zoo ads look pretty generic.

Thanks to the internet’s leading scanner-based skate sites, we gathered a handful of ads from 1994-2000 into one place. The scans are stolen from The Chrome Ball Incident, Police Informer, and Skate.ly.

Scanner File: Huf, Pang, Ponte, Steve R., Jones Keefe

Time Capsule February 22nd, 2012 · 10:18 am · 8

Once The Chrome Ball Incident came around and monopolized the scanner-based skate site game, posts of old magazine scans became somewhat unnecessary. That’s why there hasn’t been one since November 2010. But after watching those R.B. Umali “Shoot All Skaters” episodes, it’s hard not to get nostalgic for more nineties east coast images, so we dug into a stack of old magazines to look for things that the internet’s leading skate magazine scanners have yet to unearth. Special thanks goes to Alex Dymond, as he donated the stack of mags depicted above, which included an October 1998 copy of The Source (ATCQ break-up issue.)

The following five interviews are from Fridge, which was an occasionally free magazine from the late-nineties. Its content was maybe 40% skateboarding (often east coast-centric), 20% snowboarding, 35% music, and 5% other stuff. It’s amazing that just ten years ago, people actually put money into *printing* magazines based on somewhat inconsistent interests. There was somehow an audience for a magazine that would interview Keith Hufnagel and Larry Holmes, provide a guide to shitty craft beers and snowboard boots, and review Less Than Jake, Björk and M.O.P. albums alongside one another all in the same issue (which, by the way, literally had a clown on the cover.) Nowadays, if you want to talk about, say, skateboarding, the Knicks, Atlanta rap, a concrete baseball diamond in the East Village, and a bunch of rich girl hangouts on the westside of Manhattan in one place, you pay $10 for a domain name and start a website.

Police Informer Blogspot R.I.P. Shout to the Skate.ly ad archive. All images are enlargeable.

Deeper in the Skate NYC Archive…

Time Capsule May 7th, 2011 · 9:23 am · 8

It has been a quietly monumental week for New York City skate footage, at least from a historical perspective. While the Skate NYC Apple Juice documentary is quickly working its way over 5,000 YouTube views, several lesser-exposed video clips have been released to accompany it, and they might be even more precious than the doc itself. I have no clue who “skinnypoo” is on Youtube, but he just uploaded a fifteen-minute gem of raw, late-eighties New York footage featuring Harold Hunter, Hamilton Harris, Jamal Simmons, Ryan Hickey, and even Steven Cales, all in their teen years. We’re talking people who already have sparse video appearances throughout their regular skate careers, let alone footage of them skating Tompkins in 1989.

These videos, along with the documentary from earlier in the week, have quickly managed to fill in the aforementioned late-eighties/downtown gap that the Deathbowl doc glossed over. It’s amazing how there is barely any Banks footage throughout the videos, yet plenty of Midtown, World Trade Center, and Tompkins stuff, not to mention a few cutty East Village spots, including the (now blocked-off) manual pad in front of P.S. 19 on First and 11th, and the two-stair curb next to the NYU dorms on 9th Street between Third and Second. You can go two decades hearing about an era of skating that was barely documented outside of a few iconic Shut or Harold Hunter photos, and then out of the blue, someone unloads thirty minutes of never-before-seen footage. The stuff that turns up on YouTube is absolutely amazing…