Ten years in New York is a century anywhere else.
Ten years inside the asphalt baseball diamond at E. 9th Street and Avenue A is an eon or two.
In ten years, skateparks sprouted up all over the city. Autumn Skateshop closed. 7-11, Target and Starbucks opened. iPods became iPhones. Slicky Boy became Slicky Man. The city re-paved Avenue A, and they even had a sick joke about covering Tompkins’ holy ground with astro turf. You know how that went.
^ #core #skateboarding
“I can’t talk to these people about Thug Motivation when we have fake money in the boxes.” Thanks for everything man #july26ththeboydeliveredaclassic
Damn, the dude on the New Yorker cover can barely even ollie.
Free Skate Mag has another Lucas Puig Instagram remix, edited to that Young Thug song that everyone really tried to make happen #in #da #club at the start of the summer but already forgot about. Works great for the vid though.
The “Summer Trip to New York” edits are finally starting to roll in! As is the DS2 music supervision! Thought it was a drought! D.C’s Palace 5ive rolled up to New York for a bit and came back with a five-minute VX montage.
Someone made a new Cyrus Bennett remix with a bunch of his HD video blog footage.
Kareem Campbell still got it.
Quick two-minute montage with a bunch of Bronze affiliates and a three-minute montage with a bunch of dudes from the Bronx.
Whatever, DJ Khaled is still one of my favorite skaters.
Amazing that a lot of these European D.I.Y. spots started with a single quarterpipe. Or that, like, they’ve been allowed to exist for as long as they have.
Fakie Hill Bomb has a cool interview with Iain Borden, one of the most vocal pro-skateboarding architecture academics, about the future of integrating skating into modern public spaces (e.g. hopefully this.)
Making It Happen is a new all-New York vid coming out later this year. Teaser here.
The Times put together a “where are they now?” feature for that movie that skaters really like on the occasion of its 20-year-anniversary.
Spot Checks: There’s a new wallie thing behind T.F. and a BMW at Lenox.
Quote of the Week: “I watched Wild, it was like a fakeass Into the Wild.” — E.J.
In case you haven’t already heard / seen: the NYPD installed a police tower in the middle of Tompkins. Be careful doing whippits behind the basketball court after you lose on a nollie flip in S.K.A.T.E.
With spring set to appear on a daily basis somewhere in the next four months, it was only natural that unknown forces would look kindly upon the T.F. After a mysterious origin at 12th & A this past weekend, a two-foot-wide wooden triangle structure made its way within the linked fences of Tompkins Square Park.
Skateboarding is entering year three of its fascination with triangles, so the expected popularity of said obstacle cannot be understated. An eminent men’s magazine even listed one of the major triangle-centric fashion houses of today among QS reader’s favorite aesthetic directions — though they later forfeit any purported credibility with the inclusion of earth-toned cargoes (???) and éS shoes (????????) Just imagine wearing triangles while skating triangles. Shit is gonna get weird man.
Our moles inside the Parks Department have informed us that the green bandits are only interested in confiscating objects that are “good.” If it resembles garbage, it’s going to have a long life at the T.F. If you put hard work and money into building a box, you can bet that it won’t make it til the next morning. This thing is just enough of a piece of shit that it should enjoy many spring months of wallie experimentation. Hell, that green bookcase corner from 2013 lasted over a month until it dilapidated into a single piece of wood propped up by a brick.
The Triangle is like the 2015 version of The Tombstone™.
T.F. Forever.
Yesterday, the Ride Channel posted a guide to skateboard-related ## hashtags ## on Instagram, probably as some sort of distraction from the Great Follower Purge of 2014. Now, we weren’t as upset as some of our colleagues by Ride’s weeks-old assertion “that style matters more to east coast skaters because they aren’t as good” (it’s true duh), but this Instagram “guide” is a load of crap.
Who cares about Sequence Saturdays or Slappy Sundays? There is only one ## hashtag ## that matters on Instagram and it is #TFREPORT. Now, the ‘Report might have gotten diluted in recent years, as those who don’t live close enough to feel Tompkins’ magnetic draw still opt to tag their shoddy T.F. imitations with this precious label, but that hasn’t stopped its main function. Nowhere else is there such a one-stop overview for the most vibrant skateboard institution still in operation today.
What better day than today to post our annual T.F. Year in Review. As in past installments, contributors to the #tfreport thinktank cede any creative rights over their images once they are tagged. The T.F. is far bigger than picture credits. Have a good weekend. Seems like it will include some decent T.F. weather, at least for December.
Photo via Lurker Lou
Part two of our annual countdown series. Part one is here.
20. Marble at the T.F.
Throughout its history, Tompkins obstacles have been wood, steel, rubber, and sometimes even glass. The ability to move these materials without much manpower has been essential to the spot’s transient nature. Only the flat and The Crack™ remain — everything else is just passing through until some green-suited bandit musters up the nerve to remove it.
T.F. culture experienced a shock this summer when a foot-tall, slanted slab of marble mysteriously appeared inside the baseball diamond. It became the first marble obstacle in Tompkins history, and dubbed The Tombstone™. This two-foot-wide piece of rock broke the record once held by the blue rail for the longest-standing loose object of the post-Autumn era. Claims of liquid-nailing it to the ground were abound in May and June, except that was, like, way too much work for anyone to do. The spot was gone as mysteriously as it appeared by the end of the month.
