Brooklyn Banks Meet the Street '89- Part2

Yes, this is a skate video, and some stylish skaters for the day, too.  The reason I'm using this clip is that the second part of each rider's section has the exact area used for Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip Meet the Street, at the Brooklyn Banks, in 1989.  The contest was either late August or September 1989, so this video is the same time period as the contest.  In the videos from the actual contest, it's so crowded, that you can't really see this area, but this video shows it well.  The jump over the Jersey barrier at the end was in play as well.

In the last video, I told you that Vision Street Wear rider Rich Bartlett and I  (VSW cameraman) were sharing a kickbutt hotel room for this contest.  Because the corporate money, and even most of the bike industry money, pulled out of BMX freestyle earlier that year, many top riders lost their sponsors.  So I left off where we were at the contest site (seen in the clip above), and I'm pretty sure it was the Thursday before the contest.  After sessioning a while, Rich and I met up, and he told Dennis McCoy, Mat Hoffman, Steve Swope, up-and-comer Rick Thorne, and a couple other Kansas City guys, that they could crash in our room.  I thought, "Cool, this is gonna be a crazy weekend."

So this BMX posse of 8 of us started riding back towards our Midtown Manhattan hotel.  But we had Dennis McCoy in the group, and the New York City BMX locals loved them some DMC.  That's all they could talk about, Street Rogue #1.  As we started to ride off, half the freaking contest crowd started to follow us.  Some of them were other well known riders, heading to their hotels or crash pads, and a bunch were NYC locals who wanted to ride with Dennis.  All told, about 40-45 riders took off, and we soon stretched out into a block-long-string, weaving and bobbing in and out of traffic,on sidewalks and off, through Manhattan.  I was near the back of our group, which was leading the pack.  We weren't riding fast, but going more of a cruising speed, coasting standing up or dropcrank half the time.

I'd ridden with the Curb Dogs/Golden Gate Park scene in San Francisco for a year, and we'd get groups of 15 or 20 riders hitting the Embarcadero at times, and street riding a bit.  But this huge group of BMXers riding through NYC was a whole different thing, just crazy for that time period.

One or two of the better locals helped us figure out where our hotel was, and we all pulled up and stopped on the wide sidewalk in front of it.  As the guys from the back of the group got there, they were all yapping about something.  Now New York City BMXers, as a whole, were not rich guys, and some were pretty shady as well.  We learned that it was common at the time for them to ride by an outdoor grocery store, and grab and apple or something as the cruised past.  They also were really adept at snagging food bags, or a pizza box, from delivery guys, and riding off.  As a fairly honest guy, that blew my mind.  But for the rest of the weekend, I kept thinking about it, and realizing just how much stuff could be snagged by good rider.  Of course, if you got caught, there would probably be a beat down coming.

And that's what the guys were yapping about.  We passed a grocery store, maybe ten blocks into the ride.  It look a lot like the little one in the Seinfeld TV show, if you remember that.  There were outside fruit displays, and one or two riders grabbed an apple or orange as the back half of the huge BMX mass rode by.  But the store owner, well aware that BMXers, and other bike riders, stole stuff at times, watched our posse close.  He saw fruit get snagged, and ran after the riders, grabbing the last one.  Unfortunately, the kid he grabbed was Ruben Castillo, at least that's what we heard.  Ruben was one of the youngest guys in the national freestyle scene then, 14 or so, I think, and a small dude.  NYC locals circled back to help out, but our group, half a block in front of them, didn't know anything had happened.  So we kept riding. 

The locals said Ruben was kinda freaked out, not knowing why he'd been grabbed, cause he didn't steal anything.  There was shouting and yelling and pushing and shoving, the story went, and they got Ruben out of the shop owner's hands, and everybody made a break for it.  By that time, most of the group was blocks away, and those guys took a different route, and Ruben and brother Robert, so I heard, went to wherever they were staying.

Meanwhile, our group, down to 25 or so, circled around in front of our hotel, standing over our bikes, or sitting on the eats and top tubes, talking about BMX stuff.  We talked for half an hour or so, as the sun went down.  The NYC locals told Dennis stories and asked him questions mostly.  Yeah, Mat Hoffman was right there, too, and Swope and Thorne and us.  But Dennis was the guy held most in honor in NYC.  One or two at a time, the locals peeled away and headed home.  There was our 8 guys, and three or four more after a while. 

Finally someone said, "What's with that family over there, by the other end of the motel?  I thought they were taking a photo, but they haven't moved the whole time we've been here."  A few more of us had noticed them.  They were in the evening shadows, maybe 50-75 feet away.  Then we all looked at them.  Finally someone rode over to them.  It turned out they were bronze statues.  Just normal looking people that someone made statues of.  New York is weird.

Finally, our group of 8 walked our bikes through the lobby of our cool hotel, which even in New York got a lot of looks from other guests, then into the elevators and up to our room.

There were two beds, in corners of the room, which Rich and I got, cause it was our room.  That was standard BMX freestyle protocol in those days.  Yes, even Mat, Dennis McCoy and Swope Dog slept on floors when needed.  Our room had this insanely huge closet, which became the bike garage, all parked upside down, shoeboxed back and forth, to save space.  There was STILL room for 3 or 4 guys to sleep on the floor of our closet.  I'd never seen a closet that big, mega closets in houses weren't a thing then, it it seemed posh as hell.  It was bigger than two or three of the bedrooms I'd had as a kid.  The others claimed floor space in the main part of the room, bikes were tuned, and myself and a few others went down, found the market next door, and looked for cheap, but good, food.  They had big chunks of homemade cornbread, which caught my eye, and I lived on cornbread, Coke, and New York pepperoni slices for the next 2 1/2 days.

As always, this blog and this post are brought to you by Block Bikes, Rich Bartlett's shop, and specifically the new:

 Block Bikes Online BMX Shop

Check it out...