Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25036
Recognition of danger is not a popular pastime for the crowd people who participate each week in San Francisco's Frid Night Skate. They don't often use sentences that begin: "In e eventuality of..." They concentrate on the importa ings-like skating really fast in the middle of the nig through moving traffic. Backwards. Some of them don't even have brakes. Whether they're tucking down sharp city hills or darting in and out of mUltiple lanes of moving vehicles, these caster-coasters prove to be the happiest bunch of suicidal lunatics on the planet. And they find nothing else as consistently exhilarating as the Skate. The Skate was born out of the rubble of San Francisco's 1989 earthquake. Aside from delaying that year's World Series, the quake shut down a good stretch of San Francisco's elevated Embarcadero Freeway. When David Miles and a few friends realized there were literally miles of smooth, untrafficked roadway at their disposal, a craze was born. Before long the group drew local media attention, and with it a huge increase in the people who joined them. "It was like Oz up there," says Skate organizer Miles. "AII the buildings around us, al l the lights. It was magical." Oz was reasonably short-lived, however. The freeway was eventually torn down and never replaced, leaving the suddenly sizable pack of skaters to navigate surface streets. It didn't matter. The Skate had found its i e, an i i to soar. event now i 500 people a night, managing to pull three figures even when it rains. The group meets in a parking lot at Bryant and Embarca Street, just south of the Bay Bridge, for an 8:30 PM departure. Miles official MC, stirring the crowd with a pre-skate pep talk through portable PA he carries in his van. "Are you ready to have some fun tonight?" he intones, working the parking lot like a nightclub performer. Skaters take off in waves down the smooth path of the waterfront promenade, heading through Fisherman's Wharf and into the Palace of Fine Arts, some five miles away. Sidewalks up to this point are flat, wide and adjacent to the Bay, which means a minimum of cross-traffic. A sharp left turn onto Bay Street introduces automobiles into the equation, as skaters enter city roadways, coasting up Fillmore and working their way to the Broadway Tunnel . The skaters take to the streets anyway, powering up hills next to passing traffic and buzzing past suddenly slower cars on the downside. The tunnel itself provides a raised, downhill sidewalk, which seems about six inches wide when racing down it at high speeds, sometimes two abreast. Next is the Stockton Tunnel, just outside of Chinatown, which empties into Union Square, the heart of the city's downtown shopping district. This tunnel is both wider and steeper than its Broadway counterpart, and skaters happily join auto traffic, having no trouble maintaining speed as they careen down the incline.