The Art Gallery of Ontario has seen a huge amount of press since it's re-design by famed architect Frank Gehry and its subsequent grand re-opening in early 2009, and rightly so. But there are also some rad independent galleries in Toronto that are consistently serving up some exciting and innovative work. One of which is Sleeping Giant, a new art gallery owned and operated by local skateboarder Josh Glover. Glover recently opened the gallery in January of 2009 to support local artists that weren't getting the exposure he thought they deserved. A lot of the artists that he represents happen to be skateboarders as well. Drop by Sleeping Giant at 789 Dundas St. West for some great art, and check out the website for monthly events and parties held there!
A brand that has been somewhat slept on since it's conception in 2004, 80%20 is a New York women's shoe company designed Ce Ce Chin. 80%20 shoes are a almost a sneaker/fashion shoe hybrid, combining the comfort and versatility of the sneaker with designs like the classic cowboy boot. The name comes from the idea that most of us tend to wear 20% of our wardrobes 80% of the time. It's just easier to choose the faithful favorite, proof of this is the longevity of shoes like the classic Converse Chuck Taylor, and Adidas shell toes. Chin's goal is that her shoes become part of your favorite 20%. She incorporates a hidden platform into most of her shoes so sneaker loving girls can rock a pair of classic white lace ups but still add a bit of height. Her spring/summer 2009 line offers twists on her classic design scheme with the addition of flat sandals and cork wedges. 80%20 shoes are finally catching on across North America and not just in NYC, check out the spring 2009 lookbook vid and stop by Toronto stores like Little Burgundy and Get Outside to cop a pair.
I'm still alive people, just working on the major operation that is my life. I was feelin' a bit like a shakey dog, but now it's time to go against the grain and I'm feelin' mighty healthy. What's most important is to stay true, even if you grew up hard, you just gotta hold on. Live for the good times, the Saturday nights, the outta town shit, and just slow down. I'm a big girl now, no more child's play, looking for the directions to heart street and hoping not to end up underwater. You can't forget to watch out for the greedy bitches, so work on your pokerface. It's time to put on my killa lipstick and take a walk around :)
(just a little update with the help of Ghostface lol)
A feature that I wrote this year about skateboarding in downtown Toronto, the lack of resources available to skaters, and the labour of love that it takes to run an indoor skate park (I wrote it for people that don't know much about the sport, and adults whose kids might skate, so it's quite explanatory and not geared towards those who know what's up).
Gymbo Jak doesn’t want a wife, a house, or a car. He doesn’t aspire for children, or a cottage, and the debt that comes with them. Jak has a skateboard and they are inseparable. He eats off of his skateboard. It is a plate, a table, and after a crazy night it’s his pillow too. Jak thinks skateboards are the coolest shit ever, and that’s the skateboarder lifestyle.
For 11 years Jak has been the sole owner, manager and employee of Shred Central, downtown Toronto’s first and longest standing indoor skateboard park, located at 19 Saint Nicholas St., an alleyway off of Yonge Street in the heart of downtown. Shrouded by condominiums and convenience stores, “Shred Central” is spray-painted on the bricks outside in a graffiti font next to a small door that is propped open. One can barely see inside from the street, the entrance resembling something of a black hole.
Inside there is a small, dark , square room with a desk, skateboard equipment and merchandise is hung up for sale on the adjacent wall. Another small doorway at the back of this room leads into the park, ramps, rails and boxes are strategically placed throughout the tiny room; the walls are covered in graffiti. A mini fridge is packed with pop and a couple tattered couches are up against the walls for spectators, a small silver television is playing skateboard videos and punk rock blasts from the speakers. Jak used to live in Shred Central when he started the business in 1998, now he can afford not to.
Skateboarding has grown from it’s humble beginnings in the early 70’s into one of the most popular, and most profitable sports in the world today. A sports participation study conducted by the International Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association (ISGMA) in 2004 estimated 11.6 million skateboarders in America alone, and found it to be the 2nd ranking extreme sport in the world behind inline skating, with rapid growth every year. A recent leisure trends study by the International Association of Skateboard companies estimates the core skate retail industry is worth about 2.41 billion dollars, just behind the surfing good industry at 2.46 billion. Canadian store chains such as West 49 and Boathouse that cater solely to the fashions of skateboarding culture are thriving from the industry, yet the city of Toronto is falling extremely behind in providing sanctioned and safe places to actually practice the sport year-round. They will open stores that sell the goods, but provide barely anywhere to use them.
Here’s a comparison: Vancouver is a much smaller city than Toronto, yet they were building skateboard parks in the late 70’s says Jim Barnum, CEO of Spectrum Skate park Creations Ltd., Canada’s leading skate park design agency based in Vancouver. Currently Vancouver has 7 outdoor skateboard parks downtown, and a total of 16 in the Lower Mainland, Toronto has 14 in the entire GTA.
Also, in Canada’s most metropolitan city, there are only a handful of tiny indoor parks downtown to provide solace for skaters in the long, long, Toronto winters. Puddle jumping at outside skateboard parks like Poyner (aka Dunbat) at Dundas and Bathurst is the only option for skaters here from November to April.
The first outdoor skate park wasn’t built in the downtown Toronto area until 2001 at Bayview and Finch Avenue. After a councilman’s skateboarding son pressured him for a place to skateboard, he brought the proposal to the cities attention said Michael Schriner, Manager of Capital Projects with the city of Toronto. Eight years later and construction on the 15th has been under way for over a year now at Ashbridges, and was made possible by a $200,000 concrete donation from a local concrete company. With a growing population of more than 5,000,000 (2006 Toronto Census) in the Metro-Toronto area though, there are not enough skate parks to meet the demand, and the city isn’t keeping up.
“The Parks and Recreations board presented us with a report in 2004 that identified the need for several more skate parks in Toronto,” said Schriner, “but it takes time because funding is always tight, we are relying on donations and grants right now.” Building an outdoor skate park is a 2-year process, complicating the issue further. The demand outweighs the cities abilities to provide and the funding is scarce for sports of the “alternative” variety. “Unfortunately we don’t have enough money to build everything that we have to build, so we try to be strategic,” said Schriner.
Their strategy is this: Hockey rinks and basketball courts have priority over skateboard parks. Toronto has a myriad of indoor sports arenas for these mainstream sports that allow for the promotion of community building and youth involvement, but what about the hundreds of youth who are skateboarders?
It’s a Friday night outside of John Innes Community Center at 150 Sherbourne Street and a steady flow of boys clutch basketballs as they come and go through it’s doors. “The city used to have skateboarding Friday nights and Saturday mornings here” said Tim Nicholls, 21, a downtown Toronto skater, “it was fun and free, but then the Toronto Raptors made over the gym for a new basketball program.”
Despite the 14 outdoor parks created by the Toronto Parks and Recreation board, there is barely anywhere for youth who live downtown to skateboard year round at an affordable cost. They end up storing their board until the next summer, or skateboarding in underground parking garages to the disdain of security guards everywhere. Also nobody is in charge to explore providing indoor skateboard parks in the Toronto core according to Schriner, it’s a foray left up to the die-hard advocates of skateboarding to tackle. And Gymbo Jak is one of the few guys in Toronto who has taken it upon himself to do just that.
Jak moved to Toronto in 1998 from Victoria BC after a tour stop here with his punk rock band the Dayglo Abortions. In Toronto’s hardcore skateboard community, they don’t come more legitimate than Jak. He has a reproduction of the famous Jim Phillips “Screaming Hand” illustration tattooed across the palm of his left hand, “painless” he said “compared to the pain of a bad fall on your board.” But dislocating his elbow multiple times and experiencing “the worst pain I have ever felt in my life” as a result, could not deter him from skating.
An avid skateboarder since the age of 11, he begged his traditional Portuguese parents to let him built a skate park in their backyard. He collected wood scraps and spent his time building rudimentary ramps and boxes on the grass. He did this for years under the supervision of his parents who were not the most supportive at first, but having Jak around was better than having him bored and causing trouble downtown.
His passion for the sport has never waned, and when he moved here only to stumble upon an indoor skate park called “Rampsterdam” he checked the place out. It was being poorly operated by a “goofy artist named Steve,” so Jak got involved and established what would become Toronto’s most respected indoor skate park.
Steve was not a skateboarder, actually, he was using the ramps as canvases for his art and Jak was not happy about it. Neither were any of the skaters in the city, and Steve was falling behind on his rental payments as a result.
Back then Rampsterdam was the only indoor skate park in downtown Toronto and Jak saw a chance he couldn’t ignore. He had ramp construction expertise and he knew the sport comprehensively, so he approached the landlord and offered to make the rental payments himself, “I got a bunch of guys together and we built some ramps and started bringing a bit of the west coast feeling here which wasn’t in Toronto at the time.”
What was formerly known as “Rampsterdam” became “Shred Central” by the end of ’98. Word spread slowly about Shred Central though, Jak and his friends were new to the city and no one supported them. The Internet was not the same either, there were no websites with flash graphics and music to attract the kids, so Jak hit the streets. He printed hundreds of posters and put them up all over the city and saved money to publish small advertisements in low budget magazines until people finally noticed.
Jak represents millions of people who don’t fit in with the mainstream and who aren’t happy to participate in historically established sports. As a child out on the soccer field Jak often wondered why he couldn’t pick up the ball and throw it with his hands instead of kicking it, and this “pissed people off” he says, “I got into it skateboarding because sports were always so structured, skateboarding was never like that, enforcing all these rules goes off against what skateboarding is all about, no rules.” He credits the fact that he is not part of the mainstream as the reason why Shred Central has stayed afloat for 11 years, while indoor skateboard parks across Canada seem to be cursed.
In 2006 construction began on the “Ripley’s Urban Rail Park,” supposedly the largest indoor skateboard and snowboard park in Canada located at Polson Pier. It opened in 2007 and closed its doors months later without a word. The park generated massive hype, but it failed miserably. In Vancouver, popular skateboard company RDS opened up a state of the art indoor skate park backed by the biggest brands in the industry, but it struggled for it’s 3-year run and was finally closed on July 31st 2005.
“The business behind it is nearly impossible,” says Mikey Scott, a Vancouver based skateboarder and Marketing Director for the skateboarding website Bneeth.com. “It’s really hard to make it work. Indoor parks are not self-sustaining, and rent stays fixed,” says Scott. Indoor skateboard parks can be constantly rejuvenated though, which is not possible with a fixed outdoor skateboard park, but the cost and effort of constant updates is huge.
Governments cannot afford the liabilities that come with injury in an indoor skateboard park, another major hitch, “Outdoor parks work because there’s no staff, no supervision,” says Scott.
Jak takes the money he makes from admission fees and puts it all back into the park, it’s the only way he keeps Shred Central open, “I buy masonite when it’s needed, pay the phone bill, I survive on a minimal salary for myself, I live very modestly.” Jak has chosen to forgo many of life’s worries to live a life that revolves around his skate park. “It’s a real operation,” he says of Shred Central, “A lot of other indoor parks don’t last, but I can because I’m not stressing on life’s issues like that,” he says.
Brett Keon, 36, started the CBMK indoor skate park in Missisauga 7 years ago after he quit his job at an insurance company because he got sent home for not wearing a tie. “4 indoor parks closed down around here in the last year. I’ve been a success because I put everything on my shoulders, I’m working 84 hours from Monday to Friday, no one wants to put that time in, and I don’t get a pay check,” he said.
These guys aren’t in it for the money. “If I wasn’t skateboarding I probably would have followed in footsteps of the rest of my family, they all have kids and cars now, if I didn’t skate I would probably become more of an upstanding citizen,” said Jak, “lets face it, no-one really likes skateboarders.”
The need for more indoor venues for Toronto skateboarders in addition to outdoor parks remains un-resolved because the subculture appeal that makes it attractive to youth also makes it misunderstood by those who aren’t a part of the community. It makes so much money for large companies, yet the individuals that encourage it barely get by for themselves and must choose to forgo much else to make it work.
Jak doesn’t care though, “were getting surrounded by condos,” he says of Shred Central, “but I’m going to keep doing this until they build a condo here, right on top of us.”
Here's a video that captures the beauty of the sport!
So my bro just turned me on to Meth and Red's new joint "Ayo", which they are getting lots of beef for, but I gotta say that I'm on my brothers side cuz I think it's sick! I nice chillin song, with a smooth hook and dope lyrics, "City Lights" Ft. UGK is also great in my opinion. I have a total weakness for anything UGK too, RIP Pimp C. Also Consequence & Kid Cudi's adaptation of Buggin Out, which happens to be my all time FAVORITE Tribe song.....I give them props for tackling it, and they did an applaudable job....but in all honesty you can't touch the tribe!
* Disclaimer: All fashion and/or technology photo's are most often from Hypebeast or Style.com :)
About Me
Romany Kaya Williams
Vancouver; Toronto, Canada
Trying to keep things simple and failing miserably.
A fan of many things. A cultivator of conflicting interests. Stuck between two cities and famously confused.
