Back to our regularly scheduled programming, in which we discover that the expense of owning a car in 1997 drove New Yorkers to skate to work even when the streets were covered in icy black slush (something that was not really true then and is certainly not true today).

Jon Lowden called street skating a kind of performance art. I’m not entirely sure I agree with that. I don’t remember ever meeting Lowden, but google seems to indicate that he was a transplanted San Franciscan who edited In-Line Magazine for a time.

Continuing the series of excerpts from Inline Magazine, 1997, we here meet various smug types talking about why it’s better to skate in New York than in Los Angeles (perhaps true if you ignore days like last Friday when it was 1°F and windy here). Inline Magazine also introduces a trio of brothers from Queens who sound like nice guys and who continue to appear in the skating press through at least 2011. The point is made that most New York skating takes place outside of skate parks, and I agree that this has always been true.

Aggro skating in front of the twin towers

“The Empire Strikes Back” was a pretty hackneyed title even back in 1997.

Thus starts Inline Magazine’s 1997 investigation of skating in New York City. I love that they name-check The Judge (Judge Marvin Holland, a long-time figure in the city’s street skating scene). He died a little over a year ago.

The speed skate shown in the first photo is an old-school Bont; I bought a pair used around the time this article appeared. They scraped all the skin off the backs of my ankles, as they did with everybody who wore those models. I remember people trading tips on what sorts of makeup pads to buy and put in your socks to minimize the damage.

Continuing the WheeledThing excerpts from Inline Magazine, 1997, here’s the editor’s note and facing advertisement for the New York City Marathon Sports Expo. The editor, Neil Feineman, was a journalist who had written about various sports in the 1980s and early 1990s, and who had been tapped to write Rollerblade’s guide to inline skating in 1991.

A tribute to New York City as melting pot, a common post-9/11 sentiment appearing here a few years early.

Advertisement for the New York City Marathon Expo. I remember these are being incredibly crowded but a source of much swag. The New York Coliseum was a horrible building that was torn down a couple of years after this date and replaced by the much nicer Time Warner Center.

The October/November 1997 edition of Inline Magazine was dedicated to skating in New York City. Lots of fun ads showing how buying the right ball bearings would help you survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I scanned some pages, including everything about NYC, and will be sharing them over coming days.

The view from Chelsea Piers. Had they pointed the camera the opposite direction, they’d have had the Twin Towers in the background.