THE FIRST WAVE OF LEGENDARY STREET SPOTS

Many of the legendary street spots we celebrate today emerged throughout the late 1980s and 1990s along with the rise in popularity of street skateboarding and its strong connection to urbanism. These spots derived from “raw” landscapes constructed without the skater’s use in mind, cultural landmarks or “zero degree architecture.” Stemming from Lefebvre’s “spatial degree zero,” “zero degree architecture,” according to Iain Borden, applies the idea of meaningless, functional, leftover urban terrains to skateboarding and positions it as a tool for “…critique of the emptiness of meaning…” (Borden, 2019, p. 203) in this type of architecture (Borden, 2019).

The Making of Legendary Status

In the context of street skateboarding, “legendary status” refers to the symbolic transmutation of ordinary urban features into significant subcultural monuments (O’Connor, 2020). In my opinion, this status is socially produced through multiple aspects: local significance, acts of skateboarding, media coverage, associations with personalities, global recognition and historical subcultural importance.

Legendary spots can achieve their legendary status, international recognition, and subcultural meaning through long-term acts of skateboarding (Beal, 2013). Philadelphia’s Love Park, New York’s Brooklyn Banks, London’s Southbank, or plazas like MACBA in Barcelona (Borden, 2019), Kulturforum in Berlin, or Stalin Plaza in Prague all evolved from their intended architectural functions into iconic destinations within the skateboarding community. Simultaneously, it can be achieved or amplified the moment a skateboarder performs an unprecedented or highly dangerous trick that has never been done, often used in the derived form “NBD,” at that specific location, forever linking the skater's legacy to physical space (O’Connor, 2020). For example, San Francisco’s Embarcadero is famous for Mark Gonzales' “Gonz Gap” (Borden, 2019). 

The iconic position of the aforementioned skate spots is then amplified by media coverage and associations with personalities (Beal, 2013). 

I argue that these first legendary spots were able to achieve their status in part because of the format in which the skate videos of this period were filmed and the landscape in which they were published. While the introduction of handheld camcorders like the Sony DCR-VX1000, which was released in 1995, along with the emergence of non-linear editing software like Adobe Premiere in 1991 or Final Cut in 1999 (Borden, 2019), started a shift in the culture allowing skaters to bypass the industry giants, some obstacles in accessibility remained in place. Video production remained as localized monopolies, gatekept by a small circle of dedicated filmers who possessed the necessary skills, capital and hardware. On the brink of the 1990s, Mike Ternasky, who co-directed Shackle Me Not (1988), Hokus Pokus (1989) and Questionable (1992), and Spike Jonze, who directed Rubbish Heap (1989) and Video Days (1991), shaped the visual language of tape-to-tape releases. Due to the physical constraints of analog cassette manufacturing and distribution, which relied on physical skate shops, skateboarding videos in the late 1980s and early 1990s were defined by scarce, full-length releases. By the mid-1990s, digital non-linear editing made an impact with videos like Welcome to Hell (1996) directed by Jamie Thomas.

The previously mentioned aspects made the release of a video part a highly anticipated community event. Compared to the current oversaturated media landscape, the practice of rewatching specific cassette tapes countless times allowed every documented trick, skater, and urban architectural feature to be granted a prolonged spotlight. This practice ensured that the spot’s physical geography became globally recognizable to participants who may never visit it themselves, cementing its obtained legendary status within subcultural knowledge (McDuie-Ra, 2021).

Today, legendary spots serve not only as famous skateable monuments but also as irreplaceable documentation devices of skateboarding history. In this regard, we need to consider who dominated skateboarding's history-making in the 1990s. Keith Jenkins (1991) distinguishes between the past itself and history as a documented narrative. While the past is gone, history is an act, an ideologically driven construction. As such, it is “never for itself; it is always for someone” (K. Jenkins, 1991, p. 21). In the context of skateboarding in the 1990s, history-makers were the skaters who had access to media production and media coverage because those are the ones who were documented, distributed, well archived, and made into history. Legacy/traditional media and “core” gatekeepers actively molded a marketable history that centered on white, heterosexual men. The lack of coverage and representation of non-traditional skateboarders was systematically erasing their contributions from the history of skateboarding (Willing & Pappalardo, 2023). In this sense, non-traditional skateboarders are defined as individuals who fall outside the historically dominant image of a skateboarder, including young women, non-binary, non-white, and LGBTQ+ participants who have historically faced marginalization and exclusion from the subculture’s core spaces (Willing & Pappalardo, 2023).

The Gatekeeping of Legendary Spots

The first wave of legendary street spots in skateboarding served as a representation and a capsule of the late 1980s and 1990s skateboarding culture. This era is often defined as a hostile environment for non-traditional skaters (Willing & Pappalardo, 2023). 1990s skateboarding culture was dictated by hyper-masculinity, compulsory heterosexuality, misogyny, racism or sexism towards women participants, altogether creating a very hostile environment with specific criteria for meeting the subculture’s standard (Abulhawa, 2020).

As documented by Willing and Pappalardo (2023), this environment manifested in the casual normalization of racist and transphobic trick terminology (for example, the “Chinese ollie” or “sex change”), the sexualized positioning of women in print media and advertisements, or shock-value humor in publications like Big Brother. This widespread objectification created a stark representational dichotomy: women were hyper-visible as sexualized marketing devices, yet structurally invisible as legitimate athletes in articles and cover photography. Legendary status was not neutral; it was created almost exclusively through the gaze of a homogeneous demographic that controlled subcultural media outlets and corporate sponsorship budgets. 

A direct representation of the hostile environment of legendary sites is physical gatekeeping. Multiple questions arise: Who gets to skate these legendary spots? Who feels appropriate while skating them? Who holds the power to decide these questions?

Gatekeeping can be well-intentioned, serving as a spot-preservation technique intended to ensure a specific spot doesn’t get discovered by large numbers of skaters, physically destroyed or overly policed, and is kept “a secret.” This type of gatekeeping doesn’t apply to legendary spots, as their locations are widely known. Other applicable forms of gatekeeping include a natural form of gatekeeping by the location’s difficulty, which doesn’t allow beginner skaters to participate, and skater-imposed gatekeeping, where local groups of skaters intimidate "visitors." These local skaters determine who is “worthy” to skate the legendary spot (Borden, 2019). Non-traditional and beginner skaters have been disproportionately affected by this gatekeeping as they lack the subcultural capital to challenge the local gatekeepers (Willing & Pappalardo, 2023).

CONCEPTUALIZING “DYING MAGIC”

I would like to introduce the concept of “dying magic” as an analytical framework designed to evaluate the decline of first-wave legendary street spots in the current landscape. “Dying magic” describes the erosion of the spot’s legendary status and operates through three interrelated mechanisms:

1. Media Overexposure
2. Creative Exhaustion
3. Physical Destruction

Media Overexposure

The introduction of new media marked a significant shift in media production, distribution and consumption (Manovich, 2001). Skateboarding found its digital presence on skateboarding websites and blogs, YouTube in 2005, and later on Instagram in 2010 (Borden, 2019; Willing & Pappalardo, 2023). Both of these platforms influenced the distribution and consumption of skateboarding media while hardware advances such as the first iPhone, released in 2007 (Manovich, 2017), continued to increase the accessibility of skate media production. Social media sites introduced the concept of “participatory culture” (H. Jenkins, 2009), which led to the decentralization of representation in the hands of “produsers” (Bruns, 2009). Digital spaces allowed non-traditional skaters to bypass traditional gatekeepers and reduce their “symbolic annihilation” (Tuchman, 1978) historically present in skateboarding’s legacy media. 

Social Media and the absence of the need for analog media allowed for a theoretically infinite number of skateboarding videos to be produced and consumed. More frequent video coverage of legendary spots, on one hand, solidifies their importance in the culture. On the other hand, this overuse in skate media devalues these spots. The oversaturation of media coverage can also lead to them no longer being considered “real street,” as “real street” is legitimized by skateboarding being the location’s unintended use (McDuie-Ra, 2022). I argue that if a spot becomes frequently skated and overexposed in the media, it loses this misuse value. Therefore, from the perspective of valuing street videos over park/hybrid videos by the “core” skate community, their “legendary” position, originally built on the “raw street” authenticity, may start to shift and their magic may start dying.

Creative Exhaustion

When a legendary spot is heavily documented, it can attract heavy monitoring by security or accelerate creative exhaustion (Borden, 2019). Legendary street locations attract elite skaters competing to execute historical “Never-Been-Done” (NBD) tricks. Within this subculture, securing an NBD at a globally recognized site offers career-defining legitimization. For instance, Paul Hart’s backside noseblunt slide to fakie at the Hollywood 16 (Snyder, 2017).

Ultimately, NBDs become close to impossible to perform at legendary spots as they get creatively exhausted and can no longer be used to gain subcultural capital. This marks the end of media overexposure of exhausted spots, as there is a strong subcultural code against repeating “Already-Been-Done” (ABD) tricks without adding substantial technical difficulty, such as altering stance or approach. Non-famous and local spots can have an ABD repetition go unnoticed. On the contrary, legendary sites have their ABDs closely monitored and documented online for the global community, making accidental or purposeful repeats impossible to hide (Snyder, 2017).

Physical Destruction

The “legendary” status can be a damaging factor of the street spot itself. It has to withstand increased wear and tear compared to non-legendary landmarks, from everyday local skateboarders to a significant amount of skate tourists, as legendary spots are often used as monuments to visit on a skater’s next vacation. Filming a trick at their favourite legendary spot can be a very satisfactory event (O’Connor, 2020). However, this god-like position of legendary spots may be harming them in the long run.

This physical destruction inherently interferes with the theoretical preservation of these historical skateboarding sites (Borden, 2019), as they are not designed for skateboarders’ use. The damage is caused by the grinding of the skateboard's metal trucks, boards repeatedly slamming on the ground, or continuous waxing of the spot's skateable edges. The question here is whether preservation is something to consider or if performing tricks at the spot until its inevitable destruction is of better value to the community? 

As a result of cumulative physical damage, some iconic plazas have repeatedly faced shutdowns and regulatory bans; for instance, Philadelphia’s LOVE Park became the subject of strict bans in the early 2000s before it was purposefully redesigned to deter skateboarders and gentrify the area (Howell, 2005). Others have been deliberately demolished, such as Carlsbad Gap in California, or permanently blocked, such as the “Leap of Faith” in San Diego (O’Connor, 2020). On the other hand, the legendary status has also been used to try and save these landmarks from planned reconstructions that don’t take into consideration their subcultural meaning, as is the case with MACBA in Barcelona (Save MACBA, 2025).

THE NEW WAVE OF LEGENDARY STREET SPOTS

Legendary street spots have their own valuable position in the skate community. New legendary spots will keep emerging, gaining their status from local community significance, a factor that will remain the same as the first wave of legendary landmarks. I theorize that through the “dying magic,” certain factors that helped the first wave to emerge changed to the point of making it almost impossible for new legendary spots to emerge in the same way to the same point of cultural significance.

The question that comes to mind is: Will there be a new wave of legendary street spots? And if so, how will they differ from the first wave?

Skateboarding’s position is changing. It is interacting more with the mainstream/normative/dominant culture, for example, through the institutionalization of skateboarding or its addition to the Olympic Games (Willing & Pappalardo, 2023), and with this, it is gaining legitimacy and respect among the broader public and certain stakeholders. Despite this newfound prestige, skateboarders remain situated in a symbolic “grey space,” caught between their celebration as legitimate athletes and their ongoing stigmatization as urban vandals (O’Connor et al., 2025). 

Street skateboarding has been a part of cities for the past 30 years with plenty of exposure. Skate urbanism and hybrid skate spots have been on the rise (Borden, 2019). I argue that some of the new legendary spots may be hybrid, as this affords the spot longevity in its design and its expected maintenance. A perfect example of this is the Benthemplein Water Plaza in Rotterdam, Landhausplatz in Innsbruck (Borden, 2019), as well as the many hybrid spots in Copenhagen, such as Superkilen or Israels Plads. These hybrid spaces can also act as safe stepping stones for non-traditional skaters, standing in between skateparks and “raw” street spots. In their accessibility, they can further support the diversity of the new generation of skaters.

Apart from being hybrid, I also hypothesize that the new wave of legendary skate spots will, in their essence, reflect and represent the different styles and skate preferences of this diverse generation, just as the first wave represented the skateboarding culture of the 1990s, with new media and more decentralized and accessible media coverage of skateboarding, the spots which are represented are becoming as diverse as the skaters shredding them.

Another factor at play is social media, which allows skaters to bypass industry gatekeepers (Dupont, 2020). This way of documenting skateboarding and creating its history highlights new, more diverse skateboarders than traditional skate media and pushes skateboarding's difficulty and style into its new form (Willing & Pappalardo, 2023). There is also the effort to retroactively enrich skateboarding’s history with found contributions of non-traditional skaters, driven notably by Natalie Porter and her project Womxn Skate History (2025)

As media consumption habits change and video releases shift from anticipated community events to “daily routines,” it becomes almost impossible for new releases to get the prolonged spotlight that played a major role in the making of the legendary status of first-wave legendary street spots. On the other hand, these habits can pave the way for more spots to be discovered than previously possible (Borden, 2019), at the cost of their significance in skateboarding culture at large being dispersed, possibly never outshining their predecessors.

The decentralized video coverage on platforms such as Instagram may also cause new legendary spots to be celebrated more locally, highlighting grassroots communities (Borden, 2019; O’Connor, 2020). As such, this new wave could also bring greater cultural representation as it could be scattered across the entire globe, slowly changing the dominant Western/Global North representation (Borden, 2019; O’Connor et al., 2025).

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