by Board Retailers Association | Jun 2, 2022 | Community, DIY, Industry, Olympics, Safety and preparedness, Skateboard
According to a stat I just made up, there are about one billion cars currently in circulation across the globe. Yeah, cars are a leading cause of global warming and an insane amount of deaths, but they offer endless possibilities for the people who own them. Besides just driving them to your shitty job, you can soup them up Mad Max style, get laid in the backseat, and of course, use them to get an unforgettable clip. Skating on cars is definitely not a new trend. In fact, Natas was doing it 25 years before I could legally drive. Since then the tricks have gone to new heights, just like gas prices, and there have even been entire videos dedicated to skating cars. So in honor of the pioneers of car shredding, we sifted through tons of footage to pick out some of our favorite car clips to share with you. Before you ask, no, this post isn’t sponsored by Toyota like all the US Olympic athletes are. But if anyone from Toyota happens to be reading this, if you give me a free Tacoma, I’ll be sure to skate the bed of the truck and post it to the ‘gram. NATAS KAUPAS – STREETS ON FIRE [1989] Like most things in street skating, Natas is the true trendsetter when it comes to skating on cars. This boardslide in Streets on Fire is likely one of the reasons a ton of contests in the early ‘90s had a random car in the middle of the course. Thankfully, the whole high tops with high socks thing Natas was pushing here was a trend that was lost to time....
by Board Retailers Association | May 1, 2022 | Community, DIY, News, Outdoor, Resources, Skate Art, Skateboard
You might have seen footage floating around Instagram of a giant new skate spot somewhere in the middle of New York. Known officially as Under the K Bridge Park, this new hotspot is tucked away next to a recycling center and bus yard in the middle of Northern Brooklyn. On the surface, it may seem like just another public city park that’s been taken over by skaters, like Tompkins or TF West, but there is something different about this particular space. K Bridge Park is an anomaly because it breaks a lot of norms we’ve come to expect for newly built public spaces in New York. For one, it’s massive, spanning seven acres, and it’s filled with a ton of skate-friendly obstacles. The ledges and stairs have coping on them and nobody is batting an eye at the dropped-off ramps, rails, or skaters who are there every day. So is it a city park, a proper skatepark, or something else entirely? Should we be worried about an eventual crackdown, or is it actually being used exactly as it was intended? After talking with a few people behind the scenes, we got the story behind the park and what the greater plans are for Brooklyn’s newest spot. To clarify, K Bridge Park is designated as an “open public space,” not an official NYC skatepark, although it has skateable ledges—complete with steel coping—and handrails that are naturally built-in to make the park skate friendly. That means no one’s coming through to knob the ledges or rails here any time soon. It’s actually not even run by the city and is managed by a nonprofit group called the...
by Board Retailers Association | Feb 21, 2022 | Community, DIY, Skateboard
In 2011, I began teaching 6th grade at Lyons Community School, a small, progressive public school predominately serving local low-income families in the building overlooking Martinez Playground, known to skaters as Blue Park. Two years later, one Friday afternoon, my colleague knocked on my classroom door and told me there were some guys from the city trying to install some skate objects onto the playground that was being renovated, but they didn’t know where to put them. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, so I finished grading my kids’ notebooks and walked downstairs about an hour later. By the time I got to the yard, the guys from the city were gone, and the park had three funny-looking concrete obstacles right in the center. I sometimes wondered if I’d gotten down there in time if they even would’ve listened to me and what I should’ve/would’ve said… It doesn’t matter though; you can’t travel back in time, and the best features of the park were yet to come. The city had begun a renovation to the playground coinciding with the arrival of the highly selective Brooklyn Latin High School into the building. As part of the renovation, the city painted a large swath of the freshly repaired concrete yard blue and installed three simple skateable concrete objects. Shortly after, various local skaters and DIY builders began enhancing the park by dropping off their own obstacles. Pretty soon, the DIY components far outnumbered the original three city-approved objects. With the city’s laxness in allowing skaters to leave obstacles in the park, Blue eventually grew into a place...
by Board Retailers Association | Feb 3, 2022 | Community, DIY, Resources, Skate Art, Skateboard
Welcome to the third episode of Jenk TV! We grew up watching MTV and Adult Swim shows Beavis and Butthead, The Tom Green Show, and Tim and Eric, so we thought skateboarding could use a dose of that goofball editing. One thing that’s great about New York City is that it’s under constant construction, meaning you can pretty much always find some scrap wood and metal to work up a little somethin’ somethin’ to keep you skating. We got together with our car-owning construction-guru Mola to scavenge the town for stuff we could “borrow” to make a box. With a little help from a random man dressed as Mario, we were able to construct this actually super-solid angle-iron ledge that we dropped off at TF West for anyone and everyone to skate and enjoy. Take a page out of our book and build something for yourself during this quarantine. You won’t regret it (unless you smash your finger with a hammer or something). SKATERS ChachiYaje PopsonDew StacksMolaFlaxxoRob BryantKen Yettie Filmed by: Ian Michna & Alex RaspaEdited by: Rob FraebelShare this with a scavenger on FacebookReport this as looting on Instagram and Twitter If you like fun and intelligent skateboarding related articles, be sure to visit and bookmark: Jenkem Mag If you are not yet a BRA Retail Member, you can easily opt in to either Regular (no cost) or Distinguished ($100/yr.) Membership via this super simple join...
