Paved with desire

“Ca-thunk. Ca-thunk. Ca-thunk.” This is a terrible way to start any piece written about skateboarding, especially if you’re trying to convince your readers that the thing you’re writing about, the inexorable draw of the noise produced by the skateboard, isn’t totally annoying. A few years ago, there was some interest in my writing a book about skateboarding with a major publishing house in New York, and the acquisitions editor suggested I send a pitch chapter, which I began with those ca-thunks up there. They passed, rightly so. 

However, any skateboarder whose first surface was a sidewalk will have that introductory sound seared into their neural pathways. Those italicized reverberations are my closest approximation of the sensation of riding across the scored lines in a concrete sidewalk, two wheels for the first syllable, an exhilarating negative space of a split second before the back two wheels make the “thunk.” Sound is not simply heard or produced on a skateboard – the object itself is percussive, like a rolling drum on whose surface you stand – it is deeply felt. 

Skate videos from the late 1980s onwards, whose new releases every few months or so would totally transform the culture, propelling it further into the future, increasingly included the sounds of skateboarding (along with whatever ambient music and stoned voice-overs that were also mixed in). Hearing wheels passing over the cracks in a sidewalk, or rumbling along asphalt in a video, is a critical part of the reality-effect of watching a video, a comforting sense of continuity and authenticity, crucial to the soundtrack.

The most popular and famous skate spots featured in these videos, from the Brooklyn Banks in lower Manhattan to China Banks and Embarcadero in San Francisco, were brick-surfaced spots that produced their own very particular sounds. These places were built in the early 1970s, when brick surfaces seemed like an attempt to soften the increasingly harsh spaces of Late Modernism. Bricks brought a sense of warmth and humanity, a reminder of the past of these recently redeveloped cities. Because they were new, polyvalent spaces where proscribed activities weren’t so obvious, skateboarders could congregate there at first. Riding on bricks is appealing, not because of the irregularity (it’s a little bit harder to skate on bricks than it is to skate on sidewalk concrete or smooth stone), but the sound. The faster you go, the more frequently your wheels pass over the different cracks between the bricks, the higher the buzz of the sound, the better. 

To this day, the Beastie Boys’ “Stand Together” sounds incomplete without the sound of Mike Carroll’s wheels rolling across the bricks at Embarcadero, as seen/heard in Plan B’s Questionable video. Back in Texas for a few years after the release of the Plan B video, whenever my friends and I would be driving, we’d purposefully drive over the reflective bumps, called “Botts' dots,” on the lane markers and yell “EMBARCADERO!” like our car was one giant skateboard. We also localized the front of a defunct Mexican restaurant called Sombrero Rosa on Guadalupe because of the tiled sidewalk out front. Unlike Embarcadero, Sombrero didn’t have ledges, steps, a fountain, talented locals, or anything remotely appealing to skate besides the sound of tiles, which was as close as we could get to the sound of bricks in Mike Carroll, Chico Brenes, Henry Sanchez, or Jovontae Turner’s video parts. Though we couldn’t skate like them, we rested in the comfort that our skateboards made a similar sound.

These brick-paved spots were built in an awkward but optimistic moment in 20^th-century urban history. Made of brick and concrete, they were designed to accommodate the shifting needs of a provisional group of city users who commuted into the city for work or events but increasingly spent weekends in suburban malls. Both China Banks (1971, Chen Chi-kwan) and Embarcadero (1971, Lawrence Halprin) were built after the completion of the 1958 Embarcadero Freeway, and their form and function perhaps share more with suburban shopping concourses and food courts than traditional urban plazas. It’s like the bricks were used as a veneer of familiarity for these new, brutalist structures and the new ideas they proposed. 

As it turns out, these ideas didn’t age well for almost anyone but skateboarders. There are currently plans to demolish China Banks and renovate Embarcadero beyond all recognition within the next year, bricks included. So, while the opportunity to experience riding over those historic bricks might soon disappear along with the spot itself, a larger lesson remains. The vibration of skateboards riding over bricks is due to the negative space between the surface of the bricks themselves. That is where our desire rests, the same desire that had my friends all shouting “EMBARCADERO” in unison as our car bumped over Botts' Dots in Texas. That sound is a trace of movement, a vibration felt in our bones that lingers in our minds long after the place itself is gone. Skateboarding teaches us to accept, even love, impermanence, and desire thrives in that negative space between the syllables in CA-THUNK!