99% Invisible - 567- The Double Kick

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Watch a skate video today, and you'll notice how similarly shaped the boards are. It’s called the “popsicle” design, because the deck is narrow in the middle and rounded off at both ends, like a popsicle stick. This may seem stupid simple, but that basic, clean popsicle shape is actually the product of a lot of experimentation and iteration. In 1989, one particular board would cement skateboard design as we know it. But to understand it, we have to go back over a decade to the mid-70s, as more and more money poured into the growing sport.The Double Kick 

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I love punk rock. I loved it since I was a kid in central Ohio when wearing a Hooskirdu t-shirt resulted in me being threatened by dumb jocks. I still wore that t-shirt every day because f**k them. First and foremost, I loved the music. I loved the power and the purpose it gave me.

I loved reading about scenes from other cities that were way better than my dumb town. I loved everything about the punk scene. Okay, maybe not everything. One punk thing that I did not do that most of the punk and hardcore kids around me were super into was I did not ride a skateboard. In that time and in that place, punk was inextricably linked to skateboarding, but I didn't have the athleticism nor the initiative to be an actual skateboarder.

One person I know who loves skateboarding when he was a kid is 99 PI producer, Christopher Johnson. Hell yeah. I was super into skateboarding, especially back in the late 1980s. I think when we were both getting into punk rock. I mean, I love to skate. I watched all the skating videos.

My mom got me a subscription to Thrasher Magazine, and I would lay on my bed and look through all those dope pictures of all the skaters, and I was just fascinated. I'm actually still a pretty big skateboarding fan, although now mostly just as a spectator. But you, Roman Mars, you are not into skating and you never have been. Nope, not at all. I mean, you know, I appreciate it, but no. And that's totally cool.

But I still think you'll be into this story that I have for you today. It's about the history of the modern skateboard as an object. You've never been a skater, but you are a design nerd. And this is as much a story about design as it is about your least favorite punk subculture. They're definitely less favorite punk subcultures. But I get your point and I'm very excited. So when I watch skate videos today, it really strikes me that all of the skateboard decks that everyone is riding, they're all shaped almost exactly alike.

It's called the Popsicle design because the deck is narrow in the middle and rounded off at both ends like a Popsicle stick. And today that's the shape. That is the modern standard issue, capital S skateboard. Now this may seem stupid simple to you, but that basic clean popsicle shape is actually the product of a billion design stages.

Oh, billion, okay. Yeah, like three or four. And each change in the skateboard shape came out of this back and forth and back and forth between, on the one hand, the athletics of this brand new sport, which were evolving fast, and on the other hand, the design of the board itself, which was changing to meet the shifting demands of skateboarding. And this process of constant iteration went on more than a decade. And then I remember it so clearly. In 1989, one skateboard came out that helped set the standard for the deck shape that we

have today. And it totally changed the way that skaters have used their boards ever since. Okay, I am sold. Okay, tell me about this evolution. I cannot wait. Okay, so I want to go back for a second to when the sport of skateboarding really first started popping. That was back in the mid-70s.

Everyone was skating. Skateboarding is now a new mode of motion here to stay. Skateboards are here, and skateboarding is the hottest new sport to sweep the world. Every hill is a wave of motion. So you have in the late 70s, people are like, skating is big, it's this massive fad, and it's a cool daredevil thing to do. Sean Mortimer is an ex-pro skater and a former skateboard magazine editor. Look at this new dynamic sport,, you can ride up in the air

and you can be weightless and it's selling that aspect of it. Skateboarding was also being used to sell Pepsi and jeans and RC Cola. So there was a lot of money in skating. First ever world championships, $20,000 per se. This was good money in the 19, I'm just good money now. It was really good money in the 1970s.

If you happen to be in the skateboard industry, your biggest worry is counting your money. The skateboard business is enjoying spectacular prosperity. And Sean says what really helped drive the skating boom was this wave of skateboard park construction. 50 parks opened in California and Florida in less than two years and there was no end in sight. Dentists and all of these people are being sold,

like this is a great investment for your money. You can go build a skate park. Kids love it. They're paying to skate. So pretty much all over the country would be these large concrete skate parks. So what kind of skate park should I be picturing here? Like what do they look like at this time?

Picture gently rolling hills, but made of concrete. And these structures that look kind of like bobsledding tubes, but where skaters could go up and down and up and down. Compared to the skating that you see today, 70s skate park action was gentle. Maybe a little dangerous. I mean, kids were wearing pads and they were wearing helmets because safety first.

But it was kind of like roller skating. It was supposed to be for everybody. And like Sean said, kids loved it. It was super popular and it was super lucrative. And then all of a sudden, whomp, whomp, all of that comes to an end. It had got really popular and then it bottomed out. So it was like a fad like the hula hoop or the pogo stick. And the pogo stick, if you told someone you were,

you know, a professional pogo stick jumper, people would be like, what? The same went for skateboarding. All of the skating kids had grown up and they'd stopped going to skate parks and all of those parks had closed up in just a few years. It followed the track of youth, then you skate and you love it and then you get a car and you get a girlfriend.

So, you know, you had the 70s boom and then it died in the 80s. Okay, so that was the end of this first wave of skateboarding when there was a notion that it would be this mass widespread mainstream sport. Right. But obviously it didn't die completely in the 80s because otherwise, you know, we wouldn't be talking about it right now. Right, right. So it died as this trendy, all the kids are doing it, money-making sensation. But there was a handful of hardcore believers

who really wanted this. And these were the ones in the mid 1980s who kept skateboarding alive. You knew in the early 80s, anybody who skated was sort of on that same wavelength because there was no future in it. You weren't getting girls. You weren't popular because you did it.

You did it purely because you in it. You weren't getting girls. You weren't popular because you did it. You did it purely because you loved it. At the same time, all the parks are closed. So these kids are really focused on finding and building their own places to skate. Like who needs a skate park? We'll do it ourselves. And ramp skating takes over. And it becomes this whole process of free discovery.

They're building half pipes, quarter pipes, lawn tramps. And this is all happening in kids' backyards and on abandoned lots and stuff. That's when they start hopping over fences and riding things that nobody ever imagined before. You have empty pools, you have banks and schools, you have people going to write giant pipes, and that is all innovating, skating the culture

and the product at the same time because there's new demands on all fronts. So this is the first half of the 80s, and it's really different from the skate park era. No more gentle cement curves. These skaters are riding monstrous 30-foot ramps and flying 10 feet above those this is the age of big-air skateboarding okay so the terrain has changed but I was promised to talk about skateboard design and so

what kind of decks are these skateboarders riding like to catch that air like if they change to sort of accommodate this new use, this extreme use case. Right, so by this point, towards the mid-1980s, they'd left behind the skateboards from the boom years. Those skateboards were small. They were these teensy things where your feet usually kind of hung over the sides. They were like these little toothpicks. And when you're flying in the air, you need something big to land on.

The old boards were just too tiny for all of that. So skateboard start to get longer and they get wider. And skaters actually call these new boards pig boards. At the time there was a regular size, which was like a 10 by 30 board. And that was sort of the standard that had stuck around for a while, very flat with a kick tail. And that kick tail, which of course was at the back of the board, it's where the skateboard turns up kind of at an angle like a lever. Every skateboard deck had one. But even inside of that standard shape, that 30 inch long by 10 inch wide board with a flat

nose and that upturned kick tail, even inside of that template, the design of skateboard decks really varied. So for example, back in the day, if you were to stand on my skateboard, and since you didn't skate, hopefully you wouldn't completely break your neck. And you look down, you'd notice one shape where the board bulged and curved and tapered in certain ways, maybe the nose was rounded off and the tail fanned out. So that'd be one shape.

And then you stood on my friend's board, you'd see that their board was cut totally differently. This is a completely different shape. So in the mid-80s, boards weren't just getting wider. Board design got super creative and individualized. Boards were coming out in all sorts of weird, specific, sometimes even monstrous and hideous shapes. I mean, there was actually a board called the Nightmare Shape that is infamous for the craziest. Like, like, you're, it had all these like jagged angles on the side

and people were like, okay, now we're doing stuff that doesn't even, makes no sense. And so what was driving this? Was it, you know, this is what you needed to do fancy tricks on. Was it just the extremeness that was coming up as kind of this cultural force that was blending skateboarding and the punk attitude

that was pushing boundaries in every way? It's kind of all of that. I mean, some of the boards were ugly just for the sake of being ugly. Just ugly for ugly sake. Yeah, sure. But some of it was functionality. There were skaters who had really specific shapes that were cut to help them skate better.

At least that's what they claimed. And then there was the whole marketing side. A lot of boards were and they still are associated with pro skaters, kind of like basketball shoes. And sometimes you could identify boards just by their shapes, like, oh, that's a Christian Hussoi or that's a Tony Hawk. And of course, the more distinct your pro model design, the more your deck stands out, the more kid can walk into a skate shop point right to your deck stands out, the more a kid can walk into a skate shop, point right to your deck, like, I don't recognize your graphics, but I know your deck shape and I want it. I'm

telling you, in the mid to late 80s, some of these deck shapes were for skaters as iconic as the Air Jordan Jumpman logo. A big part of your identity as a pro was every board began to look a little different. So it had a it had a bit of character in it. It went from basically a generic uniform 10 by 30 shape to a lot of personality on the side, all different sizes and shapes. But this wild and crazy world of diverse skateboard shapes, it would all soon be over. And that's because the sport itself was changing so fast.

And towards the end of the 1980s, a whole new form of skateboarding was blowing up. ["Skateboarding"] Kids start to realize, not only do I not need a skate park, I don't need a half pipe or a home-built ramp or an empty swimming pool or anything. I can just go find a curb or a wheelchair ramp or an embankment behind a school and I can just go nuts and come up with some cool tricks just using my city.

This was the beginning of what came to be known as street skating. All of a sudden, anybody, no matter where you were, you could get a skateboard and you could go open your door and go skate. So all of a sudden, if you lived in the city in a cramped area, then you had a skate park right outside your door. So is this still coming from, you know, the Southern California, Dogtown and Z-Boys, you know, peroxide, blonde, floppy-haired kids from the West Coast, or is it spreading out to more of a populace at large?

That's a good question. I mean, that's of course where it begins. But then, streetskating as this new thing starts to get pumped out to the world. And that's largely thanks to media. Big skate companies were putting out VHS tapes of streetskating. Skate magazines were featuring streets street skating on their covers. There were even Hollywood movies, you remember gleaming the queue, thrashing, and even Police Academy 4? Well, they all had big street skating scenes. And so now, more and more kids around the globe are seeing street skating.

And this is when I got into skateboarding. And by the way, I have never been nor will I ever be a skinny white kid with peroxide blonde hair and Southern California vibes. Okay, just so you know. Noted. So, okay, quick question. Okay. When street skating was first getting started at this time, what did it actually look like? What were the skaters actually doing? So looking back to that era, as you might imagine, it was pretty humble. There was a lot of imitating ramp moves, like this one trick called a street plant, which was an adaptation of a ramp trick.

It's sort of a one-handed handstand that you do on a street or on a curb. But the main thing was that for a lot of their tricks, street skaters were kind of just tethered to the ground. And that was mostly because street skating hadn't quite adapted this one core trick called the Olly. And this is where I have to get a little into the mechanics of skating and I'll try to make it quick. This is what radio is made for to describe the mechanics of skating.

Of skateboard gymnastics. Exactly. It's going to be great. The Ollie is the heart of skating. It is the most fundamental trick. It's actually so essential. I don't think it's actually even considered a trick anymore. Basically, to do an Ollie, you have to snap the tail down with your back foot,

which makes the board pop up in the air at an angle. And as the board rises, you're also jumping, and you're using your front foot to kind of guide the board as it lifts. This is why you need that angle tail to get that first pop in the air. So it takes a little coordination, but the ollie is as central to skateboarding as dribbling is to basketball.

You just, you can't do much without it. So then how does this trick, the ollie, become integral to street skating? The ollie was created on ramps and in pools. And for years, that's mostly where it lived. Ramps gave skaters an extra little bit of jump for their Oli's. It was very hard to do one without a ramp.

And that's why the Oli wasn't really part of street skating until sometime in the 1980s, a pro skateboarder named Rodney Mullen figured out how to do an ollie on the flat ground. Rodney made a whole other plane you could do tricks on because before you were just kind of stuck to the ground, so you're doing maneuvers with your wheels on the ground the whole time. Rodney makes it so you can pop into the air.

There was evolving a new kind of skateboarding where guys were taking it to the streets. Here's Rodney Mullen giving a TED Talk in 2012, where he describes how skateboarders in the late 1980s were adapting his innovation. And they were using that ollie like I showed you. They were using it to get up on the stuff, like bleachers and handrails and over stairwells and all kinds of cool stuff So it was evolving upwards. In fact when someone tells you they're a skater today They pretty much mean a street skater because It seems so basic now that most skaters today probably don't even think about it

but Mullen helped street skaters figure out how to jump up into the air, high into the air, and onto things and over things. Mullen also infused street skating with all these really sophisticated, complex tricks that he'd invented. Flipping and spinning and jumping in the air on the board in a million different ways, mostly just using your feet. Okay, so this is inspiring a whole new approach to skateboarding. The athletics of this board have changed again. So what does this mean for the shape

of skateboards themselves? Like at this point, how did they evolve thanks to these innovations? Okay, so a couple of things. First of all, street skaters didn't need those giant boards anymore. They weren't concerned with sticking the landing after flying 100 feet in the air.

For them, the ollie is the main thing. So what they really needed was a better tail that was more precisely angled so that you could get that good snap and lift. And because the street tricks were getting more sophisticated and technical with all the spinning and the flipping, the board shape needed to be way less fussy and cumbersome. It needed to be less weird and more streamlined and smooth.

The skateboard was evolving fast from a big clunky piece of self-expression to this elegant tool. So now, it's the end of the 80s, and there's been all these skateboard design shifts that have happened over the previous decade, decade and a half. And this is when it all culminates in a single skateboard model

that arrives and becomes the template for the skate decks that we know today. There were three guys who really made this happen. First, there was this teenager from Edison, New Jersey decks that we know today. There were three guys who really made this happen. First, there was this teenager from Edison, New Jersey who comes on the scene. His name is Mike Valely. Fellow 80s skateheads chill. I know that we grew up calling him Valely.

But Valely, Hello, my name is Mike Valely, is how he says his last name. Mike was huge back then. He embodied that shift from so-cal surfer kid vibes to this grittier, more salt-of-the-earth East Coast energy. I started skating in the streets. That was the most exciting aspect of discovering skateboarding.

Here's Mike in a documentary about his career. You didn't need a swimming pool. You didn't need to be in California under some palm tree. You could do that in Edison, New Jersey. He was this skinny, ratty kid who was obsessed with skating. And he shaved his head, which wasn't common at the time. So he not only did he have the skill set, but you looked at him and you're like,

oh, he's not like any other skater. So he represented the new generation of what skating could be. And Valilee had other skaters around him who were pushing him to try new things. At the time, he skated for a company called World Industries, which was run by some very young skaters. World Industries was aggressive at taking on

all the dinosaur companies like Palo Peralta and Santa Cruz, and they did it by poaching their star skaters and taking shots at them in their ads, just grimy stuff. And they were rubbing everyone the wrong way, except skaters. We loved world industries. This was the new energy Roman. It was edgy. And their pros were sick, including Mike Valilly. He was amazing. So how did that world industry sort of aggro punk attitude, like did that affect the skating? Yes. So the owner of World Industries was this guy named Steve Rocco, and he was really pushing

Mike to try new things when it came to the way that Mike skated. Mike talked about this moment a few years ago on a skateboarding podcast called The Nine Club. It starts with Steve Rocco believing in, you know, switch stance skating or skating in both directions as a future of skateboarding very early on. Okay, switch stance skating. What is it?

Can you explain it a little more? At this point, most skaters could only ride with their right or their left foot forward. And that's called directional skating. Being able to do both, that's switch stance skateboarding. It's like being able to ride with your left hand just as well as your right hand. If you could ride switch,

you could really expand your bag of tricks. And Mike wasn't really into switch skating. And I don't really blame him to be honest. Skating that way is very hard to do and That's partly because of the way that boards were shaped Yes, they were getting a little smaller and they were also more streamlined than those massive pig boards of old But they still had a lot of the traits of the old-school skate decks like the flat noses in the front and the kick tails in the back. Those boards just weren't built for switch skating.

But despite Mike being kind of lukewarm about all this, Rocco, it probably won't surprise you, would not let it go. And he saw an opportunity for world industries to go all in on this idea of switch stand skating as the future of skateboarding. And he decided, let's drop a pro model skateboard design that'll really push the sport and of course his own brand forward. And Mike's name was big enough to get real attention

and make kids believe in something that looked really different. Right, right. So Rocco was like a dog with a bone when it comes to this idea of switch skating because he's got this thing that he wants to make and sell. So, what did they come up with to sort of push this idea of switch skating out in the world? So, Rodney Mullin was also skating and he was designing skateboards for world industries.

He kind of took his expertise as this highly technical skater and he merged that with his knowledge of other skateboard prototypes that were out there. And then in 1989, our star is bored. Rodney created a pro-model skateboard from Mike Valoli that has come to be known as the barnyard. So I'll get to that name in a second, but there are two remarkable things about this deck.

First of all, the shape. Instead of that traditional design with a flat nose in the front and an upturned kick tail in the back, this skateboard had two tails, one on each end. No more nose, the barnyard had two kick tails, which is a design style called the double kick. And it was the prototype for the skateboards that we have today. It was such a large leap, and it kind of leapfrogged it over these incremental steps to get there,

that it took a while when you held it in your hand because you were just so used to going, here is sort of the silhouette of a skateboard, you know, it tapers here, it's directional. And then you had this thing that to a certain extent looked like an uncut piece of wood. I have to say right quick, Roman, just as an aside that the shape of the barnyard, it was kind of a beast. Like it was cut like a big rectangular slab of laminated

wood with these slightly rounded edges and both ends were turned up at an angle. No one had ever really seen a pro model like this before. Definitely not Mike Valoli. And when Rodney brings it to Mike and he shows it to him, he's all proud like, hey bud, here's your new pro model skateboard. What do you think?

And I go, I don't know dude, it's hideous. He goes, just try it, just try it. And I go, I don't know, dude, it's hideous. He goes, just try it. Just try it. So I go in, I skate it. Yeah. And it functions. And I dig it. And I skate really well on it. And I go, okay, let's do it. And man, there was no turning back. The board just went. It's the best selling board I've ever had. When Valelie's barnyard skate deck came out in 1989, it was the first ever pro model double kick board. And it was the first double kick that was mass produced. And what was it that drew skaters to the barnyard?

What made the arrival of this board so explosive? Like such a huge deal. So first of all, it was Mike Valli's star power. Plus, there was that innovative new shape. I mean, skaters immediately saw endless possibilities. And then on top of all of that, it had these wild, unforgettable graphics. So much of skateboard art today

can be traced back to the barnyard. Just like the deck shape Herald did something new, so did the barnyard's artwork. That's because up until the barnyard, a lot of skateboard graphics had been like, oh, that's a cool design, like a hand that's also a screaming face that's got its tongue sticking out.

I know that one. Or you might see these grotesque, kind of gothy style graphics, like heavy metal skulls or bulging eyeballs or flame shooting every which way. This was nothing super deep. But Valérie's graphics were totally different. They depict a barnyard scene with a bunch of happy, fluorescent farm animals.

There's a bright yellow rooster, a glowing magenta pig, a duck with a boombox. It's a party. And all those bright happy animals on Mike's board, that art was a nod to Mike's avid vegetarianism. In fact, one part of the artwork actually even says, please don't eat my friends. So instead of snakes or gargoyles or monsters, this was social commentary. This was a political cartoon on the bottom of a skateboard.

And when you look at the board and you look at the colors and you look at the lines and the energy of it, is no, there'd been no graphic. No graphic like this previously. This was the beginning of a different era in skateboard graphics. The barnyard deck had been the catalyst for this whole shift. From that point, skateboard art really started to change. Graphics got more ironic, more irreverent, sometimes more political.

So you can see why so many people, us skaters, the industry, everybody, we were all totally sucked in. They had this very strong personality coming through on a very strong graphic in a very strong shape of a board. And so many people just wanted to be like Mike Valeli. They didn't want to be like Michael Jordan skaters. They wanted to be like Mike Laylee. They didn't want to be like Michael Jordan skaters. They wanted to be like like the Laylee. So in all of these different ways, Mike and his barnyard skateboard, they help kick in

the door and really change our sense of what a skater could look like, what skateboard art could be. And most important, what the board itself could help you do. The barnyard announced that there was a new era of skating and that was a really bold announcement. It was the extreme that came into the industry. So this sounds like a perfect moment where there's this business culture around, you know, innovation. There's like new stars with different attitudes all coming together to sort of create this thing and push everything forward. and push everything forward. Yes, and the barnyard also supercharged

this shift in the athleticism of the sport. Right. Most skateboarders had learned to do tricks like the Oli with only their left or their right foot in the back. Now, with two tails, maybe you could learn with both feet. And that's just the beginning, right? And anyway, forwards and backwards kind of become meaningless with a skateboard like this.

So you're really becoming kind of, what's the foot version of ambidextrous, ambidextrous? Yes, maybe. By the time you get to the barnyard, that is one that's truly saying you can skate both ways. You can ollie on your nose instead of just a regular ollie on your tail. All of these tricks became

different directions. You know, they always talk about the difference with humans is the development of tools and what that does to your brain. If you think of it that way, then you think of a double kick inspiring a skater's brain in a different way. in a different way. So, Roman, I remember a plain as day when I first saw the barnyard in real life. It was back in 1989. I was at my favorite skate spot, which was this place in Silver Spring, Maryland called the Armory. Today, it's a parking garage, but the old heads know we used to shred that place.

And then one day this kid named Jack, who was already an excellent skater, he showed up with this new board and it blew everyone's mind. I mean, we were all like, what the hell is that? That Jack is riding. It looked like something from the woodshop scrap pile. And then I remember Jack riding it and he killed it. Like he was doing old tricks in new ways, new tricks in crazy ways. It just upped his game amazingly. I was 13 or 14 at the time.

And of course I had no idea that I was basically looking at a huge design shift that was going to help reshape the sport and the design of decks for the next three and a half decades. Yeah, that's amazing. Okay, so you were 13 or 14 when you first saw the barnyard and now it's 30 something years later. Something, something years later. And so was this the final step before we get to that popsicle shape that you described in the beginning, like the standard skateboard design that you see everywhere today? Like, did the barnyard really set the agenda from here on out or was there more variation to come?

So before the barnyard, skateboards came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Okay, but then the barnyard drops and what had been this soft malleable clay of skateboard design really starts to stiffen and become more fixed. The barnyard became a prototype which designers did still fuzz with, rounding out the tail and the nose, and making the board a little skinnier. So they made minor adjustments incrementally until you get what you get now, which is the popsicle, which is really, you could say the popsicle is the offspring of the double kick,

and that is the staple. Basically speaking, most people ride Popsicles. So the double kick was sort of the parent of what we have now. It really is just a pure design story. Like the needs are pushing the tool. The tool is pushing what people can do. And this is feeding back into what people create. It's so interesting. And then obviously the big leap is you take this thing out and you put a second kicktail

on it, you know. But it does make me wonder if other things are possible. Like is there something out there on the horizon that could change skateboarding again in a big way, like, you know, for another 35 years? You know, actually, I talked to someone about this exact idea. Her name is Betsy Gordon, and she's a project manager at the Smithsonian, where she's co-edited a book and done an exhibition on skateboarding. And Betsy brought up that skating right now is being influenced by these huge international

competitions like the X Games and the Olympics. And she said that might actually shape the future of skateboard design. So when you're not just skating with your friends outside of the DMV downtown, but you're in these intense contests that demand super precise riding. That's one way now to be a skater, to compete in this incredibly high, trick-oriented, performance-oriented level. And will we see something completely different? I think of like those ships now that sail in the America's Cup.

They look like a boat. I mean, you know what I mean? You're like, what the? Because you're talking about wind and speed and velocity is completely changing. It doesn't get anything like a boat. So I wonder as performance starts driving skating, are we going to see a very different skateboard? I wonder. Oh, you could totally imagine some performance style skateboard that is as different from a regular skateboard as an America's Cup sailboat is to a sailboat, you know, that goes up like a hundred feet

in the air if you go up a ramp or something like this. I never really thought about this. I mean, I've always sort of enjoyed the art in this sort of, in the athleticism of skateboarding from afar as we established earlier. But it really is a good object to think about design as a whole. Like I'm really happy about this. So this is fun. Thank you. You are welcome. Every skater dreams of a great skate spot. Philadelphia had one for decades. It was called Love Park and it was perfect until the city tore it down. That story after the break.

This is a 99% of visible story from 11 years ago if you can believe that. It seemed appropriate to revisit it. Enjoy. Oh, God! Thank you, thank you, thank you! My whole damn life has been worth it, just for this moment. So I was once walking the city with my friend Kathleen, who is an environmental scientist, and she was pointing out the spray-painted markings of letters and arrows that you see everywhere on the street. The markings indicate where utility lines are running underground so they're not damaged

by construction. And it turns out they're color-coded by the American Public Works Association. Red spray paint means electrical power lines and yellow is natural gas. And I'm looking this up now on Wikipedia because I don't remember all the details. Green means sewage and drainage lines. So public works people and construction crews have their own lo-fi augmented reality scribbled right on the street, like a giant map in plain sight. It's a different way to see the city. But it's not just utility workers. The city also reads

differently depending on your knowledge, your experience, or if you happen to be standing on a rolling plank of wood. I've been lucky enough to go to these amazing places like Taiwan or LA, but I only ever get to see like the weird places that skaters go to, like industrial parks or some handrail in the middle of a school somewhere. That's our guide today, skateboard photographer and radio reporter, Andrew Norton. My friend Ariel and I are skating in downtown Toronto, kind of carving through the big, empty corporate plazas.

It's hard with a backpack. Yeah, I'll give you one of these though. To a skateboarder, the city looks different. Something I definitely always do is is look for opportunities to skateboard. I can't help myself. We compulsively look for things like ledges or curb cuts, mundane stuff that people walk right past.

But to a skateboarder, even a pole that's been bent by a car is a thing to skate. So you're always on the hunt. Like, I'll make my wife stop the car if I see something new. Dude, I even like, I even when I'm watching movies, we'll be looking for spots. Ha ha ha, you look for spots in movies? Whoa, Andrew.

Like I've watched The Simpsons and I'm like, you could skate that HUBBA. You know what? I guess I do that too. Wait, what's a HUBBA? A HUBBA is what skaters call a ledge that runs down a flight of stairs parallel to the stairs. And it's named after a famous spot in San Francisco

called HUBBA hideout. HUBBA is slang for crack. So I guess people used to hang out there, used to gather there to smoke crack. It's particularly skateboard worthy. Yeah, because it's this perfect ledge that runs parallel down the flight of stairs. I mean, ask any skater, go to any skate park.

You know, every skater will know what a Huba is. And that is how I'm going to exclusively refer to them from now on. I'm always looking for things like that. Black wax kicked on a ledge or wheel marks on a wall. These are little bread crumb trails left by my people. And once you start following these trails, they'll lead you to a turf war between the city and the skaters. Oh, this spot here. Have you rescaded these? This has long been known as a spot to meet up. And more recently, they put some stoppers on it to prevent people from skating.

So a skate stopper is anything that someone might add to something we'd want a skateboard on to stop us from skateboarding on it. So in this case, on these long, kind of S-shaped granite benches that we're looking at, they put strips of granite kind of running the width of the bench so that we can't ride along the top of it. Normally people would be sliding on this and then hit this or grinding on this and then hit, come to a stop against these. I imagine most people don't know what they're there for.

So as skateboarders I think we're hyper-s sensitive and very aware of these small things that get added. Well one of the the most traditional type of thing you'll see will be some kind of a metal peg or raised metal attachment that is either built into a wall or attached to a wall afterwards and what that does is it creates a discontinuous edge. Tony Bricoli is an architect from Philadelphia. He's fascinated with how skaters interact with the city. And though he's not a skateboarder himself, Tony's always kept tabs on the types of anti skating measures the city can deploy.

And then it gets more extreme and more ridiculous where, you know, there are companies that sell things that look like metal seashells and metal crabs that I guess for some reason that's meant to be more aesthetically pleasing, I don't know. Those aesthetically pleasing skate stoppers are all around the Marquedero in San Francisco. To Tony, the reason why modern cities are so perfect for skateboarding goes back to a French dude named Lake Corbusier. Tony Bricale wrote an essay called Thanks, Le Corbusier, from the skateboarders. In it, he contends that Le Corbusier,

as the platonic ideal of the modernist architect with his cool glasses and love of concrete, is the patron saint of skateboarders. Modernists were the ones that reinterpreted a bench in a park as a slab of granite. Reinterpreted, you know, kind of flowing landscapes, grassy areas as these kind of paved open plaza spaces. And it just turned out that wide open space with nice granite ledges at the edge made

really good skateboarding space. And who would have known? The prime example of modernist landscape architecture that's inadvertently perfect for skateboarding is Philadelphia's Love Park. Its real name is JFK Plaza, but it's called Love Park after Robert Indiana's giant love statue with that slanted O that was put there for the United States by Centennial. In the center of Philadelphia is City Hall. And if you draw a line from City Hall to the Art Museum, there's

a diagonal boulevard that connects the two. And along that axis is where Love Park was placed. The two-tiered plaza takes up an entire city block. In the center, long, wide steps cascade down to a giant circular fountain. Above on the main level, granite planters surround the plaza, as well as lots of rectangular marble benches. It's a space only a modernist or a skateboarder could love. And it's awesome for skating because you can do what we call lines, which is like a series of tricks. So you could do like a switch crook on one of the benches and then a fakie tray flip,

and then if you wanted to you could do like a switchback tail on another part of the park. Oh and the granite tiles can even be pried up to make little ramps to launch off of. The park was conceived for the late Edmund Bacon as part of his undergraduate thesis at Cornell. He later made the park a reality as the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission with the help of architect Vincent Claim. Ed's been a big deal in the architecture world since the 50s when he shaped how Philly looks today. His vision for the city even put him on the cover of Time Magazine. He also happens to be the father of Kevin Bacon. Really?

Now you're one level away from Kevin because you're talking to me, though. And I'm actually, wait, that'd be two, right? Actually, I think that's four degrees. This is the closest I've been in that game. This is very exciting. So there you go, my friend. I'm happy I could help you there. Bacon's design turned out to be perfect for skateboarding.

And then the 80s, when skating took to the streets, the timing was perfect for skaters to claim Love Park as their own. You know, there was kind of a suburban migration. There was less interest in density. And so places like Love Park were kind of sitting there, not being used. In the early 90s, skaters started filming themselves at Love Park, and the videos found

their way to the epicenter of the skate world, California. Suddenly Philadelphia was a destination for skaters. And as the skateboarding industry grew, so did the popularity of Love Park. By the late 90s, pro skaters moved to Philly just to skate it every day. They built their careers shooting photos for glossy skateboard magazines at the park. You could even virtually skate there in Tony Hawk's famous video game. So as an awkward 14-year-old passing through Philly on vacation, I was like, Dad, we gotta go to Love Park.

So I got to skate the ledges and stairs I saw in videos and on my PlayStation, while my dad read the newspaper by the fountain. I wouldn't be that excited again until I got my braces off. Even though Love Park was like Mecca, it was never legal to skate there. I don't think it's legal to skate at Mecca either. Skaters would get tackled by cops, ticketed by undercovers, or have their boards taken away. by undercovers or have their boards taken away. And the area was gentrifying. Finally in 2002, Philly Mayor John Street took the skateboard ban a step further and

renovated the park. The major thing that they did was they removed all of the granite benches, these great skatable elements, and they replaced them with, you know, kind of Williams and Sonoma-ish looking wood benches that looked like they belonged on 1890s kind of park. To disguise this decoration, the new features were meant to make it harder for skaters to use the ledges or to cruise from one end of the park to the other. So they took away the wide open paved areas and tried to replace them with grassy spaces in between.

You know, adding some landscaping, adding an actual lawn was a good idea, but the design result was kind of horrible. It's just a very uncomfortable space and not a space that people want to use. People protested the renovations. There were rallies and newspaper articles. One story read, the mayor blindly took a route of time-honored Philadelphia tradition in destroying a source of pride and fame, hard-earned by its own citizens. A big skateboard shoe company called DC even offered up a million dollars to keep the park the way it was, and to kind of offset any damages skaters might have done over the years. The city of Philadelphia declined the offer. City counselors and architects like Tony spoke out too.

There would have been a way to make some significant adjustments to Love Park that would accommodate other kinds of activities without totally compromising skateboarding and come up with a successful evolution of the space. I think that that would have been possible. I think politically that would have been too difficult. Love Park drew people to the city. Philadelphia even hosted this big skateboard competition called the X Games, the two summers prior

to getting rid of Love Park. But unlike traditional sports, skateboarding's kind of hard to control and difficult to monetize. And that's usually a little scary to the squares, but not to Ed Bacon. Bacon was thrilled that his space was evolving. Here he is from a 2006 documentary

called Freedom of Space. I think skateboarding is a far more profound revolution than people give it credit for. The wonderful thing to me is that these young people discovered that they themselves would creatively adapt to the environment they already found, and that it was their joy to adapt themselves physically to what was already there. Bacon was so against the renovations and crackdown on skaters in his park he staged his own protest. On October 8th, 2002, with the media there, two people propping him up on either side

and a blue bicycle helmet on. A white-haired trench coat clad 92-year-old Ed Bacon rode a skateboard in Love Park. Held up and pushed along on a skateboard might be a more accurate description. And now I, Edmund N. Bacon, in total defiance of Mayor Good of Ghana, in total defiance of the Mayor Street and the Council of the mayor street and the council other city of Philadelphia

hereby exercise my rights as a citizen of the United States and I Deliverately skate in my beloved love park Oh God, thank you, thank you, thank you Oh god! Thank you, thank you, thank you! My whole damn life has been worth it just for this moment. The ugly pink planters and William and Sonoma benches stole Gray Slope Park. But so does a plaque memorializing Ed Bacon, and people still skateboard there, and they still get chased by cops.

Skaters now figure out ways to work around the redesign. Something Ed Bacon would probably be proud of. Love Park isn't the iconic spot it used to be, but Skate Park started copying features from its original design. There's a good chance that if a skate park was built in your area in the last 10 years, it'll have a knee-high, modernist style bench, or maybe even those same cascading long steps like the ones at Love Park. You'll also see things like hubbos, like we talked about earlier, or even a low block

of concrete beside a small set of stairs. We call that a Pier 7 ledge, named after another San Francisco spot. These are all design elements that were dreamt up by some well-meaning city planner, and they're now worshipped by skaters. Tony, the architect we heard from, is now working on a skate-friendly city plaza that's right near Love Park. I gotta admit, part of me thinks these designated places to skateboard kinda miss the point. It's like running a marathon on a treadmill. It's not exactly the type of thing that'll get you on the cover of runners world But guys like Tony are legitimizing skating to designers and to architects He gets it a skatepark is now something that real architects can have a hand in But part of the excitement of street skating is happening upon that spot that wasn't meant to be skated

But seems like it was built exactly for a certain trick. It's like found art. That's why we're still hunting for spots in the streets. Pro skaters now fly out to China for three weeks at a time to skate the new sprawling marble plazas that seem to pop up there on a daily basis. And because skateboarding isn't as popular there, the war on skaters hasn't seemed to reach China yet. Modernist architecture appears, then skaters, then skates stoppers. And in a way, without really knowing it, we're kind of critiquing the design. Skaters say, we don't care what you made it for,

this is how we're using it. And when you land a trick there, it's like a secret victory. You put your own mark on a place. And now even us Squares can read those marks too. That story originally aired in 2013 and was produced by Andrew Norton and Sam Greenspan. 99% of visible was reported this week by Christopher Johnson, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed in sound design by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Kathy too is our executive producer, Delaney Hall is our senior editor, Kurt Colestad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Perube, Jason De Leon, Vivian

Lay, Lashamma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Sarah Bake, Jacob Moultonato-Medina and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of the logo was graded by Stefan Lawrence. I also want to give a quick shout out to the nine club podcast. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building and beautiful uptown Oakland, California. If you haven't already, pick up your copy of the power broker by Robert Caro and you can join our power broker discussion book club new episodes come out every month right

here on this feed. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, plus we have just added a new 99PI Discord server. So come and join me and the rest of the team to talk about Power Broker, you can talk about architecture, you can talk about books, talk about movies, as long as you're nice, you can talk about whatever you want to. You can find a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.