In 1986, across this span, street skating pioneer Mark Gonzales did the "ollie heard 'round the world." He ollied the gap between the wall and block section at the Embarcadero. This video is from 1993, when he went back and became the first to kickflip over what became known as The Gonz Gap.
It became known as The Gonz channel, later The Gonz Gap, or just The Gonz. The story is that photographer MoFo told Mark some other kid had already ollied this gap, so Mark decided he needed to nail it and get the photo. Mark made it, and MoFo got the sequence. This video above, by longtime Thrasher magazine editor Jake Phelps, is Mark Gonzales back at it in 1993, landing the first kickflip over it. After that, this gap became a proving grounds for top skaters, each trying to take it to the next level with a bigger trick over the gap. You can read the history of The Gonz Gap here.
On a personal note, I moved from Boise, Idaho to San Jose, California in August of 1985, and lived there for about a year. I published my first BMX freestyle zine about the Bay Area pro and amateur riders, which led to a magazine job in Southern California in 1986. So I sessioned at Golden Gate Park with the BMX guys a dozen or so times over that year, and interviewed several for my zine. I watched Tommy Guerrero and friends blast off launch ramps there. And I rode at the Embarcadero with several of those BMX guys 4 or 5 times. I rode poorly, mostly did footplants, nothing too cool. I wasn't a local, but I did ride it a little, and saw what a cool spot it was, particularly for that era. This blog post is not meant to be the official history of the Embarcadero/EMB bike and skate scenes, just a good solid look at it, and how much influence that spot had on both BMX and skateboard street.
The Embarcadero area was a park area with big, concrete, block ledges and structures that drew in skateboarders and BMXers. It was located in San Francisco, in the 1980's and 1990's. It played a huge and influential role in the history or both BMX street and street skateboarding. But before I get to that, let's go back to the roots of street skating itself.
In the early 80's, there were two main forms of skateboarding, the cool guys who rode vert, skateparks and later halfpipes, and the dorky guys who made hardly any money and did freestyle skating. There's no consensus on exactly when modern street skating started. But there's a great line Thrasher's 25th anniversary book, something like, "In 1984, Mark Gonzales launched off the side of a ramp, and things got gnarbuckle." That's as close as you're going to get to the birth moment of street skating.
But many of the foundational tricks used in street skating, had already been invented by freestyle skater Rodney Mullen in 1984. Rodney was one of the "dorky" freestyle skaters then, but he was a 5 time world champion freestyle skater. Rodney invented the flat ground ollie, the ollie kickflip, the double kickflip, the 360 flip, the flat ground Caballerial (fakie 360 ollie), and the ollie impossible. That was all before street skating really got started. Don't believe me? Check out this Rodney Mullen video from Japan, shot in 1984. In the middle of his freestyle routine, you can see Rodney do a Caballerial, an ollie impossible (technically a pressure flip), and a double kickflip... in 1984.
In the earliest days of street skating, there were guys like John Lucero, Lance Mountain and others sessioning curbs. Then came the three musketeers, really pushing early street skating in the mid and late 1980's. Mark Gonzales (1987 video) down in Huntington Beach/Orange County. Tommy Guerrero (1985 video) in San Francisco. And Natas Kaupas (1988 video) in Santa Monica (west of Los Angeles). Their magazines photos, and later video parts, began to show the world street skating. The early magazine photos and video parts of these three inspired a whole legion of early street skaters, with Mike Vallely and others coming up right behind them, and sparking progression, and the street skating movement.
Of those early three, Tommy Guerrero, was skating San Francisco every day. The reason I wrote so much in this post about early street skating is because the first video I pulled up to work on this post was a great video, it's below, but it also says, "inventing street skating at EMB in the 1990's." No street skating was already a thing, and skaters were skating Embarcadero, and many other spots in San Francisco, before that. Here's Tommy Guerrero's Transworld Legend clip, to prove it. The classic era of EMB in the 1990's blasted the progression of street skating into hyperspace mode, but they didn't invent street skating.
The BMX side of the story begins with a group of freestylers, led by Dave Vanderspek, and his bike/skate team, the Curb Dogs. Here's Dave and some of the team on a local TV show in 1985. In the clip, they start with some flatland, followed by Dave and skater Joe Lopes riding Joe's halfpipe. Known as Vander by many, he was a great bike rider, a good skater, and an incredible promoter. Maurice Meyer was the other key BMX rider in the Curb Dogs, seen in this TV clip from 1986, riding the streets, and at Golden Gate Park, the weekend hangout for BMX freestylers from around the San Francisco Bay Area. You can learn the history of the Curb Dogs on this website Maurice created.
In those days, producing videos was still a job for professional crews, but Dave managed to get a full length Curb Dogs video produced in 1986. There are scenes at :40, 1:47, 3:07, 11:42, 20:00 that show some of the earliest riding, and skating, on video at the Embarcadero. At 20:05 in that video, Dave Vanderspek bunnyhops The Gonz Gap, and there's quite a bit of skating there afterwards. Dave died tragically in 1988, and the Curb Dogs II video came out after his death. There's quite a bit of footage from the Embarcadero in the tribute to Dave, in the first several minutes.
The Curb Dogs, and other Bay Area riders, were a huge part of the early street riding influence in BMX freestyle. This was before peg grinds, wall rides, and big gaps were a thing. Dave Vanderspek doing bar endos at the edge of a ledge, along with footplants, and tweaking tabletops off curb jumps, were some of the early street riding moves. In addition the famous San Francisco downhills, with their rhythm section like drops and banks, influenced their riding, and use of urban obstacles. Vander and the Curb Dogs brought both a skateboard and a punk rock influence to BMX freestyle, at a time when most riders were clean cut, and dressed in motocross style leathers for contests and shows. Dave and the Curb Dogs were ahead of their time, and set the stage for the street riding explosion of th elate 1980's and into the long recession years of the 1990's.
Here's some more Embarcadero BMX street footage, starting at 3:20 in this video, with Curb Dog Maurice Meyer (tie dye tank top), Eddie Roman, and another rider, from 1989 or early 1990.
Now if you ask the Old School street skaters about the Embarcadero, or EMB, they probably picture something a lot more like this:
This is Mike Carroll's part from the 1992 Plan B Questionable video. Mark Gonzales' gap ollie in 1986 put the Embarcadero on the map of the skateboard world. The early 1990's skaters and video sections made it legendary, and dramtically boosted the progression, and popularity of street skating worldwide.
Here's a 13 minute video, Skateboarding History at San Francisco's EMB, that I mentioned earlier. This is a great look at a bit of the history of San Francisco as a city, and how it influenced skateboarding, particularly Embarcadero/EMB. This video is worth checking out just to learn how "hubbas" got their name. That was new to me.
Here are some of the best clips on YouTube of skating at EMB during the 1990's.
In these clips, a few EMB skaters look back on those days of skating the Embarcadero.
So there's my look at one of the most influential street spots in the history of both BMX street riding, and street skating. In The City, where bombing hills, and alternative culture spawned many things, including Thrasher magazine, street skating progressed at light speed in the 1990's and 2000's. This spot, the Embarcadero, or EMB, was legendary, and I wish I wouldn't have sucked so bad when I got to ride there a bit. I'm still not sure where the term "hella" came from, but I want to add that when I moved to the Bay Area in 1985, the skateboard term "vollie" for vagrant ollie, or an ollie over a homeless person, already existed. But there was no similar term for a BMX bunnyhop over a bum. So I polled all the main riders for my zine, San Jose Stylin', in early 1986. The vote was close, but the locals decided "bummyhop" was the best official term for a bunnyhop over a homeless guy, and yes, I've done a few, long before I actually became a homeless guy myself.
Multi-flash manual sequence at the Embarcadero of Maurice "Drob" Meyer, taken by 19-year-old photographer Spike Jonze.
BMX street was just beginning to turn into its own thing in 1989, and this sequence combines several things happening at the time. First there's Maurice, who was riding the crazy streets of S.F. from his early riding days, a city full of big hills and amazing urban terrain. In my mind, NorCal riders pioneered street riding, followed closely by San Diego riders. Then there's the Embarcadero, this public park plaza that just looked like it was built to be ridden and skated, back in the 80's, when there were no real skateparks left from the old era, and before the later parks built in the 1990's and 2000's appeared. We rode the streets, wherever we were, because that's what we had.
Then there's young Spike Jonze, who shot this sequence. Spike was an East Coast BMXer/skater kid who hopped in the Haro Tour van in 1986, and became a roadie for Ron Wilkerson, Brian Blyther, and Dave Nourie. Spike landed at Ron's house in Leucadia, and soon landed a job at FREESTYLIN' magazine in early 1987, where he started shooting photos seriously, guided by veteran photographers Bob and Windy Osborn. For little added spice, there are the zine covers at the bottom, art direction by FREESTYLIN' magazine editor Andy Jenkins, and his sister Janice, the magazine's art director/graphic designer at the time.
When this photo was published, the first wave of BMX freestyle popularity was just beginning to crash, major bike companies were starting to pull their money out of BMX racing and freestyle, and throw that money at mountain bikes, the new trendy thing at the time. All of us young people in our late teens and early 20's, who had become hardcore freestylers in the previous few years, were about to witness the "death" of BMX freestyle. That was the collapse of the age of wearing uniforms and helmets to ride flatland, and the rise of street riding in shorts and T-shirts, and rider-made zines, videos, and companies. This photo sequence encapsulates that time of the cusp of the transition from 1980's fad sport to hardcore lifestyle sport of the early 1990's. Thanks Maurice for reminding me of this photo, to flesh out this post about The Embarcadero's influence on both BMX and skateboarding.
So now you know some background of an epic spot from back in the day, and learned a few vocabulary words. Go ride or skate, and make the most of your local spots. 43.
No comments:
Post a Comment