THE GREATEST CURBS IN HISTORY
WORDS: Stu Gomez
Behind every great event is a great curb. But, somehow, our concrete heroes don’t appear on no stamp. We’re changing that today.
November 22, 1963
Dallas, TX
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated at Dealey Plaza. The general consensus is that Lee Harvey Oswald (aka The Pasty Patsy) acted independently, no-scoping JFK from a nearby book depository. The Zapruder Film famously captured the infamous moment when Americans lost their innocence, opening the door for numerous crackpot conspiracies. Chief among them is that the sweet curb in the above image is an exact match for a curb that was previously seen at a Soviet training facility in ‘62.
August 8, 1969
London, England
By the time The Beatles released Abbey Road, the Fab Four (+1) were tired of the standard, photo shoot/album promotion bollocks. (Even the ahead-of-his-time John Lennon famously was like, “Yo, why we shootin’ photos? We tryin’ to drop that fire slapper.”) But they changed their tunes, so to speak, when they peeped this perfect 6-inch tall concrete strip bordering the perimeter in St. John’s Wood. Fun Fact: Let It Be, the group’s following (and final) album, was a nod to Lennon’s tip for frontside slappies. Still relevant today.
1965
New York, New York
I’m on the pavement, thinking about the government… When Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan released “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” it was clear that he was thinking about much more than the government. And as he flipped through his flash cards at the Savoy Hotel for D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (the first lyric video), he was also flipping the script: going electric and predicting the golden age of old dads skating curbs. Poetry in motion.
April 26, 2018
Southern side of the DMZ
With the addition of skateboarding, the 2020 Olympics are already incredibly significant. But the Games have also served as the catalyst for another momentous event: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un crossing the demilitarized zone to have a summit with South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in. This hasn’t happened for a long time, and the literal centerpiece is the world’s most famous double-sided curb. In the video footage of the event, both leaders do a little pop-over on either side of the curb, forever cementing the legacy of the next Olympic Games.
1955
New York, New York
Marilyn Monroe turned heads with this titillating scene from Billy Wilder’s Seven Year Itch. But, like the itch that curb dogz experience when spotting a waxed beauty, Monroe’s upskirt triggered a different kind of Pavlovian response. Skaters salivated for other waxy reasons, and most of us still can’t watch Monroe blowing in the wind without thinking “hurricane.”
