#TRENDWATCH2016 | Quartersnacks

#TRENDWATCH2016: Heritage Spots

Daily News September 29th, 2016 · 5:00 am · 6

heritage-spots

In 2016’s edition of the always wonderful “Song of the Summer x Part of the Summer” series, Frozen in Carbonite stumbled on a name for a #trend that has appeared in a good bit of this year’s footage: the notion of “heritage spots.”

There are a multitude ways to be nostalgic. Some fondly tell yarns of the past, remembering the wild days of to-go margaritas being consumed in public, and bust-free, straight [fucking] ledges existing in lower Manhattan. Others spend their precious years on earth leaving comments about how Lil’ Wayne ruined hip-hop on YouTube videos. More and more skaters are winking at the past via fashion; outlets like Vintage Sponsor have made a name for themselves by trafficking in garms from skateboarding’s sartorial lineage. Our more talented colleagues time travel through tricks nobody is supposed to do anymore, via the darkslide, pressure flip or street grab’s increasing presence in modern videography.

A new form of loving past eras has recently began to take form. In the past nine months, the following events have occurred in New York:

1. Pyramid Ledges has been unknobbed for the first time since 2010, ending the longest drought the spot has experienced since the building first began skateblocking it in the early 2000s.

Back to School Special: The Rebirth of the Pace Ledge

Daily News September 8th, 2016 · 5:02 am · 5

pace

In the early 2000s, a trick on the Pace Ledge was a watershed moment for any child’s skate career. We’d pass it every weekend — dreaming of a noseslide if we were regular or a 5050 if we were goofy for the hammers section of whoever’s bad video filmed on a Canon GL1 with a Kenko fisheye. That is, until it was dismantled by bike pegs and rendered unskateable thanks to a six-inch-wide chunk at the ledge’s most opportune starting point. Little kid dreams were crushed (we even removed it from the spots page!), and by then, everyone was eyeing tricks into the Verizon Banks anyway, or just generally better at skating.

With the vapor of early-2000s nostalgia from February fashion week still running thick, today we are reminded of the magic that a bit of Bondo could do. After filling in the aforementioned cavity, the Pace Ledge is ripe for skateboard tricks for the first time since the George W. Bush administration. Now, this brings about the age old question for nitpicky filmer types: has the ABD scroll been erased after a dormant decade?

With short term memory growing shorter thanks to G-Pens, do we accept Challex’s or the Vickie Report’s tailslide as existing in a world where J-John the Don didn’t already do it switch and German? Do we disregard Todd Jordan’s back tail that went down during the much-maligned Mixtape 2 era? (Can’t find the photo but it’s ~out there~) Will an early-2000s nostalgist perform a noseslide bigspin on the ledge this #nyfw, disregarding Brian Brown’s contribution to the ledge’s storied history?

Actually none of this probably matters because Antonio switch frontside 5050ed a ledge that is nine times higher than the Pace Ledge like five blocks away ;)

A video posted by Antonio Durao (@antoniodurao) on Sep 6, 2016 at 7:40pm PDT

NYFW Wrap-Up — #Trendwatch2016 Early Report

Daily News February 19th, 2016 · 5:00 am · 14

acne studios shoelace belt

With many unseasonably warm days this winter, we were already able to see some of 2016’s #trending formations. And with a seasonably bitter cold #NYFW, we were able to sit there with hungover stares and contemplate it all. Keep in mind that the to-be-mentioned hungover contemplations may seem awfully dated by the time of the Polar video’s stateside premiere in March. Our most impressionable and yearning-for-inspiration L.E.S. colleagues will inevitably be Bloby-fied come April.

Lo-Def 5050 Combos

For many of us, 180s and shove-its into and out of 5050 grinds were our earliest flirtations with combining tricks. As our palettes became more refined and our skateboarding matured in accordance with the times, these were inevitably phased out and thrown into the pile known as “little kid tricks.” That pile, by nature, sits there and stagnates — unless of course you ran out of tricks to try in S.K.A.T.E. and need a sex change to give the dude a letter, or the even rarer occasion that skateboarding collectively chooses to to re-embrace a little kid staple like the varial flip.