The Bicycle That Sat in the Background of Every Beach Photo Look at almost any photograph of a Southern California beach town between the late 1970s and the late 1980s and a particular bicycle keeps turning up at the edge of the frame: wide tires, a heavy curved frame, fenders, no gears worth mentioning, usually …

The Rider Was the Product In the 1980s skate industry, the deck under a kid's feet was rarely the thing being sold first. The thing being sold was a person — a pro skater whose name was on the board, whose graphic was the graphic, and whose style in a magazine sequence or a video part told the buyer what the brand …

A Format Nobody Expected to Sell When Powell Peralta released The Bones Brigade Video Show in 1984, the company expected to sell about 300 copies on VHS. It sold 30,000. That gap — two orders of magnitude between the forecast and the result — is the whole story of how skate video became the dominant marketing medium of …

The Boom Was Built on a Bust The popular image of 1980s skateboarding — vert ramps, backyard halfpipes, street skaters grinding curbs in the suburbs — looks like a culture that chose the margins on purpose. In a sense it did, but the choice was forced. The reason skating moved out of purpose-built commercial parks and …

In 1986, on a plaza of granite ledges and brick gaps in front of the Embarcadero in San Francisco, Mark Gonzales ollied across a gap that no contest had a category for. There was no judging panel, no coping, no transition — just a flat run-up, a tap of the tail, and a jump cleared over a stretch of pavement that office …

Two skate tees sit on the same table. Both carry the same late-80s graphic, the same washed-soft hand, the same faded ring of a logo across the chest. One is an original run worth real money to a collector; the other is a reprint pressed twenty years later off a scanned art file. Nothing on the front separates them. …

"Sidewalk surfing" is the phrase that gives away the secret. Before skateboarding had a name of its own, it borrowed one — and the borrowing reveals exactly how the first generation of riders understood what they were doing. They were not playing a new sport. They were surfing on land, killing time between swells, …

Eleven minutes into Back to the Future, released July 3, 1985, Marty McFly grabs the handle of a child's wooden scooter, rips the crate-and-handlebar top off it, and turns the deck into a push board to outrun Biff Tannen through a 1955 town square. The stunt skating was choreographed by professional freestyler Per …

Hold a mid-1980s Vision deck face-down and the difference from its rivals announced itself before a single trick. Where a Powell Peralta board pressed skulls and swords into dense, illustrative detail, and a Santa Cruz board screamed in thick-outlined horror, a Vision graphic tended to arrive flatter, bolder, and …

In 1991, Mark Gonzales walked away from Vision Skateboards — the company that had given him one of the most influential pro models of the decade — and put his name on a deck stamped with a brand whose title was a pointed insult to his former sponsor. Blind Skateboards, launched under Steve Rocco's World Industries …