Before the Supreme store, and the second Supreme store, and the Supreme store diaspora, veteran New York skater Alex Corporan says he learned about skating in 1985 at a newsstand on 181st Street in Washington Heights.
"My best friend Freddie, I saw him skating outside. He said he got his board from this catalog in Thrasher Magazine," Corporan told me in a phone interview. He found Thrasher at the same newsstand where he collected "Conan the Barbarian" comic books. The two started skating together.
"I knew the minute I touched the board, it was gold," Corporan said. "I was like, oh, there's the rest of my life right here."
At first, Corporan and his friends skated uptown. He said at that time, Washington Heights "wasn't your cool guy neighborhood."
"I was growing up around drug dealers and all that," he said, and described himself at the time as "a weirdo kid" into comics and skating. Later, when Corporan was in high school, he and his friends started going to the Brooklyn Banks skate spot downtown, a discovery that Corporan said was "just one of the most insane things to find in your life as a kid."
"That was our safe haven where no one bothered you. It was just a bunch of bums, human shit, dog shit, and needles. And us," Corporan said. "Nobody honking a horn at you, no people screaming, 'Oh, you fucking skateboarders!' That was a place where we were safe."
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