Thirteen feet and 300 pounds of steel painted pine green, the bench was first installed as part of a set in a Santa Ana office complex in the late 1990s. To the skaters who first encountered it, it was a once-in-a-lifetime obstacle: its gradual arc provided a unique sensation for anyone talented enough to grind or slide its length, and its distinct look made for memorable photos and video footage. It was too good to just sit there.
Intrepid skaters cut the bench from the ground, both to preserve it and to hoard it for themselves. For a while, the bench was a staple of a DIY skatepark in Los Angeles, where it played a supporting role in some of the best skate videos of the early 2000s, like Girl Skateboards’ Yeah, Right! and DC Shoes’ The DC Video. Then one day, it unceremoniously disappeared. That’s normal—spots come and go all the time in skateboarding. But now, after almost 20 years, the bench is back, and, thanks to the hard work of skateboarders across the country, it has earned an almost mythical status in its own right.
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Professional skateboarder Anthony Van Engelen, or AVE, was one of many to skate the bench in its heyday, but his name became synonymous with this particular hunk of steel when his brand Fucking Awesome released Dancing On Thin Ice in 2020. At a spry 42 years young, the video contains some of AVE’s most impressive skateboarding and ends with a switch backside noseblunt slide, one of the hardest ledge tricks imaginable. The gravity of the trick was almost overshadowed by AVE’s obstacle of choice: that same old green bench.
“I definitely knew it would trip people out, like, ‘Is that the bench from The DC Video?’” AVE told VICE of its unlikely reappearance, which was the focus of a Quartersnacks documentary the next year. “To loop back around 20 years later and be able to film some stuff on it that, for myself, in my 40s, it means something.”
When Fucking Awesome opened a flagship store in the East Village in 2021, AVE left the original bench in a skatepark in southern California and brought a replica that he’d commissioned along with him. For a year, it sat in Tompkins Square Park, until one night this August, when a group of skateboarders from Philadelphia made off with it in the middle of the night.
They brought the bench to Philadelphia’s Municipal Services Building, one of the city’s most popular skate spots, with grand intentions: “Posting a picture of this bench at Muni, this cursed-ass image that looks kinda Photoshopped, would be so fucking funny,” said Harry Bergenfield, one of the Philly skateboarders behind the heist. Afterward, they left it at Cecil B. Moore Plaza. “We were hyped,” he said. “It looked good. Philly kids were skating it.”
Their photo and the accompanying story were a huge hit among skateboarders, spawning memes, reposts of tricks filmed on the bench, and an Instagram account dedicated to tracking the bench’s whereabouts. It even provoked tongue-in-cheek coverage from the New York Post and NPR, which fanned the flames while perpetuating the story of a sort of “turf war,” much to Bergenfield’s chagrin. “It was a practical joke between me and my close group of friends in Philly and our counterparts in New York—all those Homies Network kids who hang out at Tompkins,” he said. “We didn’t expect anyone except for those kids to care.”
When a grainy video of a forklift removing the bench from Cecil started circulating Labor Day weekend, everyone assumed the story was over. But on September 7, a group of blue-collar skaters from Richmond, Virginia, known as the Bust Crew, posted a photo on Instagram of the bench sitting in a parking lot, sans caption or any outside context. Incredibly, they had managed to save the bench from the scrap heap and were dragging it through the region’s finest parking lots.
“It’s cool that Bust Crew took it,” Bergenfield said. “Not because the heat is off us, but because it’s more widely understood that it’s just a joke, and everyone feels more comfortable being in on it.”
AVE is in on the fun, too. Rather than being upset that the bench was stolen, he appreciates that more skateboarders will get to skate the bench now that it’s on the move than when it was sitting in storage. “My experience with that bench is usually that an individual or a small group takes it and keeps it for themselves,” he said. “But this thing where they’re letting other groups of skaters in the country bring it to hot spots, and people are getting to session it, that’s pretty rad. I didn’t anticipate what’s happening right now.”
“It’s just a joke, and everyone feels more comfortable being in on it.” —Harry Bergenfield
Until recently, the bench’s origin story was never public knowledge—it was local lore or hearsay across the skateboard industry—and its second life would have never happened without the help of internet-era outlets or Instagram, where weird niches can thrive. Now it’s part of skateboarding’s shared culture, and especially welcome at a time when anything remotely authentic-feeling runs the risk of being co-opted and sterilized for monetary value, branding, or other nefarious purposes. Following the bench saga, everyone can make jokes, speculate on its next move, and even watch pro skaters get in on the action, in real-time. There’s even a conspiracy theory: that this is all part of an ongoing Vans campaign, since AVE and Gilbert Crockett, a pro skater who’s a part of the Bust Crew, both have pro shoes with the brand.
“Much of what it means to be a skater is being impressed by places and people we see on screens,” said Kyle Beachy, author of The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches from a Skateboard Life. “For certain skaters, there are locations, objects, images, and figures that achieve a status something like the sacred. The great thing about the bench is that it’s mobile in ways sacred skate spots (obviously) are not, but also it’s cumbersome and heavy and not the sort of thing that can move without serious effort. Like skateboarding itself, you’ve got to really, really want the bench in order to move it.”
As intimidating as the bench is, the physical act of skating it isn’t nearly as impressive—or funny—as simply having the bench in the first place, and where it goes next is anyone’s guess. Even where it is now is a mystery: On Instagram, overlapping posts seem to place the bench both in Richmond and back in Philly. Rumor has it another group of skateboarders is planning to bring it further south, while the upcoming Dime Glory Challenge in Montreal seems like a prime opportunity to sneak the bench across international borders.
“Skateboarding needs lore and myths,” Bergenfield said. “We love that shit. We obsess over the details, all the bullshit we love. This is just another silly story [that] kinda got blown out of proportion. We don’t do stuff like this in skateboarding that often, and the real story is about AVE—how his hard work endowed this bench with meaning and now everyone wants to see if they can crooked grind it.”
As for AVE himself?
“If skaters can keep it in their possession and not get it taken, it’ll be interesting where it goes. I hope the story just gets more and more bizarre.”
