Eventually, someone cut the locks, so “then we put U-locks on it,” AVE continues. “It was either going to get stolen or someone was going to go there and do something better than you did,” AVE says in the Quartersnacks video. During the couple of months while the film was being shot, the bench was chained down outdoors overnight. One of them, it was eventually revealed, had been taken by friends of the professional skateboarder Anthony Van Engelen, known as “AVE.” (He recounted this story this year in a short video documentary for skate blog Quartersnacks.) After sitting in a Santa Ana garage for some time, it was hauled to Downtown Los Angeles for the filming of The DC Video, a classic skate video from 2003 in which AVE and other pros do various tricks across its wonderful curved edge. By the 2000s, both had been sawed off their bolts by enthusiasts and taken from the site. They were, however, set back amid some shrubs, making the approach less than ideal, and some unnamed skaters decided they had to be moved. Some benches (and rails and ledges) are higher or longer or more difficult to skate, but the particular curve of these two was just right.
In the late 1990s, skateboarders discovered that the benches’ long, gradual arcs could make any slide or grind look incredibly sick. The bench started out as one of a pair, bolted down in front of a medical building in Santa Ana, California.
The green bench! That’s because this particular 300-pound piece of steel street furniture has become one of the most storied objects to skate around and on, and its arrival on the East Coast adds a coda to a two-decade saga of discovery, theft, loss, reconstruction, and a particularly hard-won switch backside noseblunt slide across its 13-foot arc. If you’re a skateboarder - or a former skateboarder, or at least somewhat skateboarding-adjacent - and live in New York City, that sentence cannot be read without an exclamation point. The green bench is in Tompkins Square Park right now.
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