Natas Kaupas in Streets on Fire: The Day the Street Went Up the Walls

A fire hydrant, planted on a sidewalk. In 1989, in the Santa Cruz video Streets on Fire, Natas Kaupas gets on top of it with his board and starts spinning on the cap, like a top set down on the city’s furniture. Nobody had looked at a fire hydrant like that before him.

Watch Natas Kaupas in Streets on Fire, Santa Cruz, 1989 (Thrasher Classics)

In the same part, he opens on a wall: the board leaves the ground and rolls vertically. It’s often said that it was there, in 1989, that street skating started climbing walls. The date is a good one. Is it actually right?

To find out, you have to rewind the tape. Further back than you think.

Streets on Fire, 1989: the part Thrasher still brings back

In 2014, Thrasher put the part back online in its Classics series, presented by Keith Hufnagel. The magazine sums up Natas in one line: a pioneer who made use of all the terrain the street offered him. Not ramps built for him. The street as it is.

The 1989 Natas is no longer an unknown. Two years earlier, his part in Wheels of Fire – 1987, already with Santa Cruz, showed an ollie over everyone. Etnies offered him his own pro shoe, a new idea in skateboarding. We told this story in our Natas Kaupas profile.

An empty pool in 1976: the wall before Natas

First problem with the nice date: Natas didn’t invent the wallride. Nobody knows who did it first. The oldest trace leads to empty pools, in the mid-70s. Here’s the path of the wall, in five dates.

1. 1976: Tom Inouye in the pools

   « We were all trying to get up on the wall. I think I was the only one who could, » recalls Tom Inouye. The trick became the wallride, and he kept the nickname Wally for life.

2. 1979: Rodney Mullen goes backside

   The backside wallride is credited to Rodney Mullen. The future inventor of the kickflip, then called the magic flip.

3. September 1984: the Thrasher cover

   Craig Stecyk photographs Natas rolling along a wall. Thrasher makes it their cover. Natas is 15, he grew up south of Santa Monica, and he wants neither ramps nor parks.

4. 1987: Wheels of Fire

   Natas’s first part for Santa Cruz. His ollie goes beyond anything people were seeing back then, and the part points skating in a different direction.

5. 1989: Streets on Fire

   The part opens with a frontside wallride. Further on, the fire hydrant. This is the version everyone has watched on repeat.

Natas, Satan, parks: 4 myths about the tape

There are plenty of legends floating around this part. Not all of them hold up.

A fire hydrant on the sidewalk: the spot nobody had seen

The moment everyone remembers comes later in the part. Natas ollies up onto a fire hydrant and spins on top of it. Wikipedia calls it a 720, two full rotations. The trick takes its name: the Natas spin. He would later go on to snowboarding, then to the Tony Hawk games.

But the strongest thing isn’t the rotation. It’s the object. A fire hydrant is a chunk of cast iron for firefighters. It’s not made for you. In 1989, Natas shows it can be used for something else.

The wall said: the street can replace the ramp. The hydrant says it even louder: anything sticking out of the sidewalk is a spot. Benches, trash cans, barriers, bollards. The city becomes a skatepark nobody designed.

So, 1989: the day street skating climbed the walls?

No. Street skating was already climbing walls in September 1984, on the cover of Thrasher, with the same Natas. And wallriding had been happening in pools since 1976. If you’re looking for the exact day, it’s five years before the tape.

What 1989 changes is the format. A cover is a frozen image you flip through at the newsstand. A VHS is a move you rewind at a homie’s place until the tape wears out, the sound crackling, the TV too close to the couch. With Streets on Fire, you finally see how they get up on the wall, how fast, from what angle. And you see a fire hydrant is all it takes.

Streets on Fire isn’t the day street skating hit the walls. It’s the day everybody could watch it happen, then go out and do the same in front of their own crib.

After 1989: from Rick Howard to the walls of Philly

The wallride then hits a lull. Rick Howard brings it back in 1993, at the end of his part in Goldfish – 1993, the Girl and Chocolate video. Then a crew out of Philadelphia takes it to their city’s architecture: Rick Oyola, Matt Reason, Serge Trudnowski, Fred Gall. They make Donny Barley want it too, and the chain keeps going.

Today, when a kid looks at a fire hydrant on the way to school wondering if it’s makeable, a bit of Natas is watching with him. For the technique, we broke down the wallride’s attack angle. For the brand that put out the tape, read what still holds up at Santa Cruz. And that same year, Ray Barbee showed up in Ban This.

In your town, what’s the piece of street furniture everybody eyes, figuring it’s makeable? Fire hydrant, bench, parking garage wall? Tell us in the comments ↓