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Video: Rooftop Skateboarding Around Brooklyn
By
Ben Yakas
Published Jan 23, 2014
Modified Jan 23, 2014
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Carlos Jaramillo
By
Ben Yakas
Published Jan 23, 2014
Modified Jan 23, 2014
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Last year we received a dramatic photo of a skateboarder jumping over the tracks at the 145th Street stop in Harlem. That shot came from a video "Tengu: God of Mischief"—but subway skateboarding wasn't the only thing that director Colin Reed, aka MandibleClaw, was filming. He also spent over two years capturing people doing rooftop skateboarding around Brooklyn. And you can see a video of it below.
Reed told us no one got hurt or in trouble while secretly making the video around the borough: "It wasn't meant to be a 'controversial' or 'viral' piece, instead it was an exploration of how you can push the boundaries of skateboarding, and open up a whole new world of possibilities," he said. "This is not a regular past-time of skateboarders, no."
Reed said he and his friends had an epiphany about a "whole world of unexplored skate spots right above our heads." It took over two years to film all the stunts in the video; he said they could only film in the cold months of the year when the roofs were hard (you can't roll on roofs when they're soft and soggy in summer).
Skater Matt Town being filmed by Colin Read (Ben Kilpatrick)
To explain more, Reed sent us comments he made to French skateboarding site "Live Media":
And then, it's hard to find spots. You can't just go walking around. We'd scout for potential spots by riding the elevated trains all around the city. But it mostly involved a lot of trial and error, and what you might call illegal activity. We had a few tactics: we'd wait for people to walk into buildings, just catch the door before it closed (or hit all the buzzers and hope someone got annoyed and buzzed us in) and run up to see if we could get on the roof from the stairwell. We'd jump and grab the bottoms of fire escape and climb up. And we'd ask everyone if they had roofs we could get onto to check out. Many attempts at getting onto a roof or finding a spot were fruitless, but just as often we'd finding something unique and exciting.
Finally, of course, it was dangerous. There were some close calls where people got terrifyingly close to falling, and a few boards were lost off the edge. (But we always made sure no one was walking on the sidewalk or street below before we tried a trick.) And we had to run away or hide form the police a few times, too.
Check out more clips from and trailers of the skateboarding video (now available on DVD) below.
Tagged
colin read
rooftop skateboarding
skateboard
skateboarding
tengu
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Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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