It's not unusual to see nattily dressed young men outside the tony provincial government building on Toronto's St. Clair Avenue. What is unusual is when roughly 50 of them congregate there with their skateboards. But that is exactly what happened Sept. 6 when members of the Toronto Longboarders and guests arrived for their "Board Meeting" in dress shirts and ties -- even the ones with mohawks -- to go for a ride, subverting the suddenly trendy Situationist flash mob principle to suit their own purpose: namely, to have fun, and to heck with social politics.
"The whole idea was to create community," says event organizer Benjamin Jordan, a 22-year-old photographer. "I'm really passionate about longboarding, and there was really no community. Most longboarders don't seem to know any other longboarders -- it's almost like an elitist individualist kind of thing. I used to feel that way, but at the same time I really wanted to have some people to skate with."
There's an important distinction to make between longboarders and shortboarders. When you think of skateboarding, you're usually imagining shortboaders or pool-and-ramp riders: Avril Lavigne's sk8ter bois pushing their short (30 inches or so), graphics-heavy boards, riding or grinding park benches or stair railings.
Longboarders, on the other hand, are driven by the thrill of cruising or carving around street corners, bombing down hills and clocking up some speed, typically 40 kilometres an hour as they surf down roads as if they were water.
Designed for speed and stability, the boards are longer, usually 56 inches, in a variety of shapes, with a simple racing stripe the most usual decoration.
Jordan, who just placed third in a recent longboarding competition in New York, purchased his first longboard when he was 18, after five years of skating on shortboards. "It's not the same for everybody," he says, explaining his reason for the switch.
"I got hurt a lot. And as I got older, I basically regressed in skill for skateboarding. I became more and more scared of doing stair sets and tricks. Longboarding just became really attractive because it was still a way to coast around, but you couldn't do tricks if you wanted to. It's not designed for that. And once you get going on it there's a really great element of speed and freedom."
While longboarding and shortboarding share "similar physics," as Jordan puts it, longboarding is a completely different sport.
"It's much less aggressive," he says. "You could put longboarders into the class of soft-punk hippies, and skateboarders are hard-punk hip-hop. I know I used to be a skateboarder and that was more about rebelling, I think. I did enjoy the sport and it kept me in shape, but it was more about drinking in the park with friends and defacing property. But longboarding is a completely different experience."
And while you might be able to identify a shortboarder (under 18, baggy clothing, getting chased away from parking lots by security guards), the people riding the longboards are more varied. For one thing, there are more female longboarders than shortboarders (about 10 per cent compared to 1 per cent). And it's not unusual to find older skateboarders.
Tom Browne, for instance, a 43-year-old Toronto man, has his own graphic-design company and is married with two children. But he's been skateboarding since 1975 and is one of the founding members of Metro Longboarders, an ad hoc group that has been meeting every second Sunday for the past seven years for day-long rides in and around the city. He'll even take his board instead of a car to do errands.
"Some people might think it's odd that guys in their 30s and 40s are skateboarding, but it's no different than guys in their 30s and 40s playing hockey or baseball or soccer," he says. "It's something I really enjoy, I've been doing it since I was 15, and I've kept it up. It can be as easy as I can make it, or as difficult as I can make it. There are no rules -- you don't have to follow 18 holes around a golf course."
Skateboarding's own history has enough hills and troughs to challenge both short- and longboarders. The first real skateboards were actually longboards, appearing in the sixties when surfers began eyeing scooters and devising a means of "sidewalk surfing" for days when the waves weren't so agreeable. The seventies witnessed the first tricks, such as the Ollie (a jump), and also the first fatalities. Skateboarding became illegal in many cities, and still is today -- in fact, Jordan had to move his event to a new location after a call from Toronto Police reminded him that any skateboarding -- and rollerblading and scooter-riding for that matter -- on public property was subject to fines.
"The laws here, at least in this city, or province, are really behind," says Jordan. "People would like to legally be able to rollerblade or skateboard on public property -- at their own risk -- and have the same rights as bicyclists."
When people were banished from sidewalks, pool and ramp riding became big in the eighties, and the nineties saw an explosion of skate parks; Toronto has three, two in the suburbs, one downtown.
Since there are few competitions for longboarding, save the occasional slalom-style event, there are fewer longboarder superstars, and no universal heroes or endorsement regulars such as shortboarding's legendary Tony Hawk.
"It's much less commercial, and people prefer it that way," says Pete Wheldrake, the owner of Hogtown, one of Toronto's biggest skateboarding and snowboarding dealers. Hogtown sells a longboard package by Sector Nine -- the biggest name in longboards -- including deck (the board), wheels and trucks (the mechanism keeping the wheels to the boards) for about $230. Or for those former sidewalk surfers of the sixties turned blue-chip company executives, there's BMW's Streetcarver (using the same suspension in its trucks as in its 5-series cars), which sells for about $700.
There are no dedicated longboarder magazines, although the community will flip through the at least half-dozen skateboard magazines available -- Thrasher, Big Brother and Transworld Skateboarding, plus Canada's own Concrete Powder and Concrete Wave -- all filled enough glossy advertising from companies such as Billabong or Vans to make the publishers of Vogue green with envy.
And longboarders are image-savvy but not victims of fashion. "In skateboarding, there's a lot of fashion. In longboarding, there really isn't," says Jordan. "We just look like regular people, although we've got a longboard."
Dressed for comfort or in a dress shirt and tie, there's no telling how people might react to the sight of a Longboarder.
"Sometimes people say you're going to kill yourself or kill somebody else," says Browne, "but then sometimes, if I'm going downtown I'll be at an intersection and a guy in a suit will look down and smile. We'll start chatting and it'll turn out he used to skateboard and is quite impressed. And then the other day I was out testing a board in my neighbourhood and a little old lady said, 'You're really great! You must be a professional.' "