Keith Hufnagel skating Black Rock in an ad for Real Skateboards. Photographer: Gabe Morford.
Named “Sickest Skate Tour” by Sarah Hotchkiss in KQED’s article “The Best Art I Saw in 2023,” our Skate Modernism walking tour is back by popular demand!
San Francisco's California Street, as it stretches up the east side of Nob Hill, is one of the great thoroughfares of twentieth-century architecture, boasting exemplary buildings and plazas designed by a veritable who's-who of architectural firms and landscape architects. As such, it also happens to have played a central role in the history of skateboarding in San Francisco, the most compelling backdrop to hundreds of popular skate videos and still photography. Join art and skate-historian Ted Barrow on a walk down California to the Embarcadero, exploring the way that Modernist design and skateable surfaces and spaces have made San Francisco the mecca that it is.
The tour meets at St. Mary’s Square (California & Quincy streets) and ends at Embarcadero Plaza.