Ted Barrow let his hands drift across the long brass railing that might otherwise seem completely out of place in the middle of a carpeted room had it not been in the San Francisco Public Library’s art gallery – or minus the iconic back story.
In 2000, a skateboarder named John Cardiel miraculously skated down the rail when it was installed on a long stairway behind the then-Levi's store in San Francisco’s Union Square. It took him three painful tries to accomplish the feat — and soon afterward skate barriers made sure it was never skated again. It’s the perfect artifact for the library’s new art show detailing San Francisco’s long, storied skateboarding history.
“Every skateboarder in the world recognizes exactly what this rail is,” said Barrow, who organized the show which is running in the main library’s Jewett Gallery through July 6. “Not only is it an archival object that’s been preserved, it’s a relic of this one epic thing — but it also shows how intense San Francisco’s terrain is.”
San Francisco’s concrete terrain has long been a mecca for skateboarders drawn to its famous hills and cement topography. In the 1980s, videos of young skater Tommy Guerrero ripping down the city’s sidewalks and curbs proved as tantalizing to skateboarders as the cries of gold for speculators during the Gold Rush era.
Which leads to another of the show’s significant artifacts: a 1980s video camera used by Jacob Rosenberg to record skaters and their growing feats, which only enhanced the lore of San Francisco’s skateboard scene. The videos of skaters pushing their tricks to new levels made their way globally, only further enhancing the city’s legend.
“People would come from around the world to go to Embarcadero,” said Barrow of the famous skate spot. “And they would just show up and they would see the most legendary locals and traveling skateboarders in skateboarding at that time.”
The show pays homage to many of the legendary sites in San Francisco where skaters once gathered, performing tricks, filming each other and building underground communities. There are references to the Hubba Hideout, Union Square, Raoul Wallenberg High School, Pier 7, as well as the many hills where daredevil skaters would test their mettle.
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When sites like Hubba Hideout were torn down or remodeled, like Union Square, skaters swooped in to snatch up bits of concrete or bricks. A display case in the exhibit holds some of those sacred pieces of granite, rebar and brick scavenged from the construction sites.
“We planned this exhibition as a tribute and a kind of love letter to skateboarding and to this scene and time that for me was so deeply influential," Barrow said.
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It’s a bit of irony that just outside the library and the skateboard exhibit, the curbs and benches are fitted with metal skate barriers to keep skaters away. Perhaps it merely serves as further evidence of the contentious relationship the city has long had with skateboarding. Many have complained about the destruction left behind by skaters — chunks of missing concrete and worn curbs left in their wake. Barrow sees it differently.
“I look at all this grind and slide marks and the patina that it accrues on these ledges as just loving embrace," Barrow said.
The walls of the library gallery were covered with photos of skaters leaping into the air, fearlessly clutching the tips of their boards, as they twist and turn. There were covers of Thrasher Magazine, the cutting-edge skateboarding magazine founded in San Francisco in 1981. The photo of a worn curb at Wallenberg covered an entire wall, its intricate detail reflecting years of sliding skate decks. An undercurrent of the show may be the different way people share urban space.
“Skateboarders really look at the city and the urban landscape in a totally different way than normal people,” said Megan Merritt, the library’s senior curator of exhibitions.
For Barrow, who is an avid skateboarder once lured to San Francisco by its legendary skate scene, the exhibit is a tribute to the concrete city and its long four-wheel history.
“It is for me an opportunity to perform a labor of love about the city and a scene and the individuals who have kind of forged this radical culture," Barrow said.
