Last weekend the Autumn Bowl played host to the First Annual Brooklyn Motorcycle Show. I know nothing about motorcycles or Brooklyn, but a friend easily convinced me to take a roadtrip to the NY due to my desire to skate the Autumn Bowl, since I had never been there before. We headed down from VT and made it to the city in an 8 hour shot, grabbed our decks and headed inside.

The Autumn Bowl is down this way.

There's something strangely kin about motorcycles and skateboards, though I'm not entirely sure what it is, it seems to work and Saturday, September 19th the alley leading toward the Autumn Bowl was fraught with dirty skateboarders, dirty motorheads, and really dirty crossover skateboarder-motorheads. Motorcycles and motorcycle crews seems to be all the rage right now in New Hampshire and Vermont, so you figure if it's big up there, it's been going down everywhere else for a while.

Bikes and bike enthusiasts.

Custom motorcycles were on display, beer was cheap and only required a charitable donation and as darkness took set in outside, a barrage of long-haired, fast-fingered metal bands ripped up the deck of the bowl, causing the enthusiastic and beer-lubricated crowd to take over the bottom of the bowl, ending the skate session and transforming the bowl into a beer-covered mosh pit playground. Dudes were throwing themselves against the deep end, sliding down the wall headfirst, one girl was doing a killer solo rendition of the robot and a couple fights went down, including a lady-spat where one girl smashed a bottle over another girl's head.

Guitarist in the first band, actually he was in one or two of the other bands as well.

The photos I have here (some taken by my elph and some by the point and shoot connoisseur, Nicole Driscoll) are grainy and feature poor lighting, but think of it as a realistic-photo journey through an experience that had bad lighting and was really, really dusty, because both of those were the case. The building that houses the bowl is of questionable origin and more pigeons than people call its floors home. While all of this adds to the mystique of the spot, it creates a barely pentrable cloud of black dust when the bowl is filled with people. Step inside, look up the stairs to the deck and wish that you had brought some sort of hospital face mask. I left with a variation of black lung and have been coughing for days, but I'd still go back tomorrow to skate immediately (especially if Brooklyn was a little less of a hike to get to). That bowl is fun.

Frontside grind in the deep end.

Two little boys were spit-polishing this bike, showing the child labor is not only cost-effective, it's adorable.

The crowd.

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