Let’s keep her going til the Hardbody holiday party ;) • Previously in 2017: 25-16
Past Editions: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010
15. New Titleholder For the Most Insane T.F. Obstacle of All-Time
We have sessioned some pretty awful excuses for “skateable” obstacles at Tompkins in our day. Thanks to the efforts of NY Ramp Co‘s “leave a box and see how long it lasts”-approach, this year experienced some prolonged weeks of T.F. actually having a real box. (One of those boxes was even the MacGuffin behind Pat Hoblin’s seminal work of performance art.)
…but the thing depicted above — a newspaper box, 3/4ths of a square made out of round steel, and two foot-and-a-half long scraps of plywood — was about as fried of an obstacle as the T.F. has ever seen. And we’ve skated a fucking printer here before.
14. Soho’s Best New Spot
2017 marked ten years since the Summer of the Supreme Ledge, a mere footnote in the annals of New York skate history, but nonetheless a fun time when there was such a thing as a bust-free ledge spot in Soho.
Ten years passed, and something even more unprecedented entered the history books, when the Wingus Skateboard Team™ took matters into their own hands, like their resourceful peers from a decade ago, and created Jersey Alley’s hottest new skate spot.
13. KTV Shuts Down, The 90s Officially End
Photo via Colin Sussingham
How KTV managed to stay open for as long as it did is a question best left to anthropologists. God bless it for being one of the last beacons of lawless-within-reason behavior (in Manhattan, at least.) Never again will there be so easy of an answer for where to go when there’s 25 people trying to catch a buzz, and 3/4ths of them only have $4 to their name.
12. The Midwood Bowl
Midwood has to be one of the most barren neighborhoods for skateboarding (and pretty much everything else) in New York. And New York itself has to be one of the most barren destinations for backyard pool skating in the country. Unless someone out there has a Hasidic uncle, how the hell did somebody even find this thing?
11. The Roslyn Resurgence
Thanks to some new pavement, the only spot in Long Island that Gino Iannucci would bother taking a visitor to experienced an uptick in coverage this past year, particularly for those with romantic youthful notions about spending entire Saturdays hanging out in an empty parking lot.
10. The Gang Corp Videos
There’s a certain condescending line often reverberated by bitter old guys about anyone half their age: “oh, they never leave the skatepark.” These guys are the skate version of dudes who deride any music that they don’t understand as “mumble rap.” Gang Corp is made up of L.E.S Park’s most familiar faces, but watch either of the two videos they put out this year, and you’ll see how stupid writing them off as “skatepark kids” sounds.
If last year’s Birdgang videos reminded us of what it’s like to be 15 again, both of Gang Corp’s videos from 2017 remind us of what it’s like to be 18 or 19 again — out skating for 14 hours each day, all of your friends progressing and growing into their abilities, hungry to get clips, and completely unconcerned with who else did what where and how.
9. R.I.P. Shorty’s
Photo via John Cruz
It was unlike anything else a hundred miles, let alone fifteen, in any direction of the city. To quote Dylgr, who hasn’t skated for more than ten minutes straight in the current decade: “Shorty’s is the coolest thing any of my friends have ever done.” Thanks to everyone who kept it going all those years.
8. T.J’s 2-Trick Lafayette Demo
this nigga @enwhytj #beasbeasbeas
2017’s reigning “Did you hear what _____ did?!”-titleholder kept a lot of his output confined to Instagram and hearsay this year, but these two in the bike lane in front of Supreme got people talking more than anything that had a “Magnified” on Thrasher.
7. They Knob Gay Ledges, Ledge Skating in Manhattan Reaches All-Time Low
Things got desperate in those years proceeding Seaport 4.0’s demise — so much that New York’s least politically correctly named spot became a “premier” destination for skating a ledge for more than five minutes in lower Manhattan.
Getting kicked out of here was always an exercise in the absurd; you kinda had to look at the Parks Department officer and say, “…really? This place, too?” Now this strip of stone is free for dogs to shit on without worrying about skateboards until a big wave swallows up the earth.
6. The Brooklyn Ledge Renaissance
Hey man, for a few years there, morale was LOW if you were a fan of straight [fucking] ledges. We got sick of Lenox, Flushing is a on-again-off-again bust, and don’t get any of us started on those benches behind Citi Field…
2017 will no doubt get a bad rap in the history books, but we S.F.L. devotees will remember it as the year when the invisible hand of ledge skating — the same one that guides the truck on every Spaniard’s fakie crooked grind — gave us Chauncey Ledges, the colored Bed-Stuy ledges that don’t have an official name yet, and BAM 3.
Bonus Mini 5 — Best #musicsupervision of 2017:
– Roy Davis JR. “Gabriel” in Jamal Smith’s Palasonic part
– The Plugz “Blue Sofa” in Max Palmer’s Call Me 917 part
– Bootsy Collins “Munchies For Your Love” in the Mike Carroll part of Manolo’s FTC remix (18:12 mark.) Kinda got choked up watching this ;)
– Strap “Woah Kemosabi” in “ANOTHER TRAP VIDEO”
– Light Asylum “A Certain Person” in “Atlantic Drift: St. John’s”
