The Legend of the Jinx Bank

Here's Brian Tunney at the Jinx Bank, last year (2019), talking about the impression two photos from the Jinx Bank, 30-some years ago, left on him.  

As usual in my BMX posts, I'm going back 34 years into the foggy memory banks, but here's how I remember it happening.  If you have read very many of my BMX posts in my assorted blogs, you know my 1985-86 zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job at Wizard Publications in August of 1986.  Officially, I was the sole editorial assistant, so I was an assistant to Craig "Gork" Barrette, editor of BMX Action, and Andy Jenkins and Mark "Lew" Lewman, the guys writing FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Unofficially, I took over for Don Toshach, who actually had an English degree, and was the proofreader for both magazines.  I was also the official driver of photographer Windy Osborn, driving her to many of the photo shoots, and being her assistant on those,.  I went from a NorCal freesytler, making 57 pizzas in 4 hours at Pizza Hut, to working at THE MAGAZINES (!!!!) in one day.  Huge life change, and I flew to L.A. with my bike (Skyway T/A), a suitcase, and $80.  That move change the entire course of my life.

I wound up roommates with Gork and Lew, in Redondo Beach, 3-4 miles from the Wizard offices.  We worked more-or-less 9 to 5ish, and put in extra hours near the magazine deadlines.  On Saturdays and Sundays, if there wasn't a local contest somewhere, we all did our own thing, mostly.  My weekends started with waking up, making a HUGE plate of about 12-15 small pancakes, and chowing those down while watching Lew's VHS copy of Bones Brigade II: Future Primitive.  In the intro of that video is this great sentence by C.R. Stecyk:

"200 years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground, and it took the minds of 12-year-olds to realize its potential."

Every Saturday and every Sunday, I'd carbo load on pancakes, watch Bones II, then grab my bike, and head out on an all day "scouting mission," as I called them.  I'd just go exploring my new world on my bike, Redondo Beach, and the South Bay area of Southern California.  Street riding was something we all did then, but it was in its infancy as a "thing" that actually had a name.  Street skating, pioneered by then Vision skater Mark Gonzales, Curb Dog/Bones Brigade skater Tommy Guerrero, and Natas Kaupas, was just a year and a half old.  Those guys were just beginning to explore the urban world as one big skatepark, waiting to be sessioned.  Us BMX freestylers, and particularly Andy J. and Lew at FREESTYLIN', were heavily influenced by those early street skaters.

My favorite part of Bones II was (and still is) Tommy Guerrero's section, right at the beginning.  I'd seen Tommy jump launch ramps in Golden Gate Park, and even shot photos of him for my zine, and he blew my mind with how high he launched off jump ramps, and his style, along with the other NorCal street skaters.   I never really got to know him, but his use of the insane San Francisco terrain for skating made me want to go find cool shit around Redondo, and then session it on my bike.  So that's what I did, weekend after weekend.  I'd head off in one direction, usually to a known street spot to start, and then I'd wander in some area I'd never been to, and ride down alleys, behind shopping centers, and into weird little nooks and crannies, looking for cool stuff to ride.

One day, driving Windy and Ron Wilkerson to a photo shoot, at a quarterpipe behind a bike shop, on PCH in Redondo, we went 2 or 3 blocks too far, and so we rolled back two or three blocks down this alley, up the hill from Pacific Coast Highway.  It was the photo shoot for some weird new Wilkerson trick, called the abubaca.  we didn't know what that was, Ron had invented it on tour.  Windy and Ron were talking as I drove the Wizard Astro van down the alley.  Off to one side, I saw this weird, but awesome, bank next to a wall, in a little parking lot.  My rider mind made a mental note, and I then drove on and found the quarterpipe we were looking for.

Two or three weeks later, as I headed out after my pancakes and Bones II, that bank popped into my head.  So I headed up to PCH, and headed south.  It wound up being a few blocks past where I thought it was.  I was kind of lost, and came from a totally different direction, when I first saw it in the van.  It took an hour or so, but I found the bank.

I'd never seen one like it, and I'd never heard Gork or Lew mention it, and they rode that area all the time.  I went up a hill from PCH, behind this building, to the back parking lot.  From that side street, the parking lot went down fairly steeply.  The asphalt bank started as flat, and gradually got taller as the parking lot dropped down.  At the high end, it was 5 to 6 feet high.  I did a couple carves and kickturns on it, and scoped out the transition.  It wasn't too kinked, and rode pretty well.  This probably happened in September 1986, somewhere around there.

To put things in perspective, wall rides on bikes didn't exist yet... officially.  On a photo shoot with Windy in Huntington Beach, I saw English bloke Dave Curry do a tiny wall ride.  More of a wall bounce/slide.  It blew my mind.  But he was popping off a tiny, one foot high bank, and slapping both tires against the wall about a foot up.  At the time it was amazing, but Windy didn't think it was worth a photo that day, and it was getting late, anyway.  So Dave Curry didn't get the first wall ride photo in a magazine, which ultimately, is probably a good thing.  Nothing against Dave, but I'll get to that in a bit.

At that time, in 1986, I was big on doing footplants when street riding.  I would bunnyhop and footplant on ledges, benches, and wherever.  I got that idea from both Dave Vanderspek and the Curb Dogs, and from Eddie Roman, another Skyway rider.  So I started doing footplants, riding up the big end of this new bank, bunnyhopping, and planting my right foot on the wall.  There was a business in that building, like paint store, or electric supply store, something like that.  But they never came out and yelled at me as I bounced on their wall.  So I kept riding.

Within half an hour, I was hitting the tallest part of the bank, around fivefeet high, and doing a footplant on the wall two or three feet above that.  That bank was made for those.  I was having a blast.  That is, until I landed hard, and snapped my cheap ass, one piece cranks.  I think that was the only time I ever snapped a pair of cranks.

So that ended my session, and I had to "scooter" my bike back to the apartment, more than a mile, dropcrank, pushing with the other foot.  When I got back to the pad, Lew asked what happened.  I told him I found this amazing bank to ride, was doing huge wall footplants, and snapped my crank.  Lew went through all the banks he knew in the area, but this new bank was one he had never seen.  So I told him I'd have to take him there sometime.

The next Monday, I found a pair of used cranks in a box in the rafters at Wizard, and I was back in action.  The next weekend, I was back at the new bank, doing big footplants, kickturns, little bunnyhop bank "airs," and having more fun, another solo session.  I came down hard from a footplant, and I cracked my fork dropout.  It started to clink and wobble, and I didn't want my front wheel to fall off.  I had that happen once, and it's not a good thing.  So I headed back to the homestead.  The next Monday, I found an old pair of Randy Tischman's forks up in the rafters, purple Kuwahara ones, I think, with weird little stands on the top of the curves.  I put them on, and was ready to ride again.

It took a couple of weeks, but I finally got Lew to follow me to this new bank one Saturday.  He did a few kickturns or something, to get the feel of the bank.  I started doing my footplants, and Lew said they looked way gnarlier than what he had imagined when I described them.  Lew started trying footplants, or something, and got sketchy on one landing, crashed, and rolled his ankle.  It was a mild, but painful, sprain.  That ended our session.  As we started heading slowly home, Lew was pedaling gingerly on his sore ankle.  He said something like, "First you snapped your cranks, then your forks, now I sprained my ankle, this bank is jinxed."  And that's how the Jinx Bank got its name.

The next Monday at work, Lew actually told everyone how gnarly my footplants were, and said Windy should shoot photos of me there.  I was stoked, because I was absolutely desperate to get a photo of me riding in the FREESTYLIN'.  But Lew was known for exaggeration, which  Andy called "The Lew Factor."  Andy J. said, "Lew says these footplants are really gnarly, but when we add in The Lew Factor, that makes them kind of gnarly."  One of these days we'll get Windy to check them out, but no photo shoot right now.  We never made it back out there for Windy to see them.  And Lew never went back to ride the Jinx Bank, it did its number on his psyche.  Myself, I went back every couple of weeks, and took Craig Grasso there often.  Grasso and I had many more great sessions at the Jinx Bank, and neither of us broke bike parts or body parts.  No more Jinxes from the Jinx Bank, after it had been named.  We told R.L. Osborn about it once, and he had actually been there years earlier, after hearing about it from some skaters.  But he never went back.

I got laid off from Wizard at the end of December 1986, and never got a photo of me riding the Jinx Bank.  I did make it back up there for 3 or 4 more sessions, over the next few years.  The last time I went, the building owners had made the small asphalt curb at the bottom, making it hard to ride and skate, without some plywood to lay over the curb.  You can see that in Brian's video above.

Later they added the weird wood thing on the wall, which you can also see in Brian's video above.  That made it largely session proof, for either bikes or skates.  But the coolest thing about the Jinx Bank for me was that when I left, Gork and Lew knew it was there.   Because of that, about nine months later, this photo of Eddie Roman, doing the first wall ride ever in a magazine(since Dave Curry missed his shot) was taken, by Windy, at the Jinx Bank.  It's one of those epic Windy Osborn photos.  This photo changed bike riding instantly, and forever.  With that one photo, suddenly wall rides were possible, and walls, especially banks to walls, were in play.

 Eddie Roman, first BMX wall ride photo, at the Jinx Bank, 1987, I believe.

 While I never got a photo there, and was never a great rider, my Tommy Guerrero and pancake fueled solo scouting missions found the Jinx Bank, a spot that later changed BMX freestyle history.  Not much, but I was stoked the first wall ride photo happened there.   A while after that, Craig Campbell also got an epic wall ride photo there, as Brian shows in the video above.

Street riding progressed rapidly over the next several years, and turned into its own genre eventually, as we all know.  Craig Grasso added his flavor to street, many times over the years.  Here he is on another local bank, a favorite photo of mine.

 Craig Grasso, bank backside boneless.

I may not have had a riding photo in FREESTYLIN',  but in BMX DIY fashion, I gave myself a quick, but decent, wall ride clip in my 1990 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend.  And a stylized version of this sketchy video still below is on the T-shirt I'm wearing right now, 34 years after rediscovering the Jinx Bank.  Wall ride over my sister Cheri's head, Blues Brothers Wall, Huntington Beach, 1990.  May the "minds of 12-year-olds" in all of us never stop discovering cool shit to ride in our urban environment.

I've started a new blog, as of May 2022, Check it out:

Steve Emig's Street Life- Dealing with change and building a new life in the 2020's.