I’ve been consciously not making this site overly skate industry focused. While I did work in “the industry,” I’m hyper aware that there are many amazing creative people beyond this circle who have been brought up as skateboarders. Mark Nardelli is one where I’m proud to be veering off the course. 5Boro has been a shinning light from the East coast and has been true to real street skateboarding since it’s creation.
When did you start skating? What was your first skateboard?
Got my first board in the 80s, it was a G&S Chris Miller given to me by my Grandfather as a X-mas gift. I guess it was the skating trend when “Fat Boards” as they were called then had become popular. It was just as vert tricks started popping on the street, street plants, ollie to 50-50 stalls, launch ramps, the beginning of street skating. I had that G&S board for a while and would use it to bomb hills in my neighborhood. My friends and I all had boards and we would see how far we could roll without touching the ground starting at the top of the hill. It wasn’t till a few years later that I actually got bit by the skate bug and went hard at learning tricks, reading magazines and really becoming a skateboarder.
When did you stop or slow down significantly?
Funny question as I am assuming you think I don’t skate anymore haha! I don’t think I ever really stopped skating since the late 80’s, but there have been times in life when jobs, school or stuff came up that I had to handle biz which made me skate less. Of course injuries and my crutch time over the years from rolling and tearing ligaments in ankles always took me off my board for a bit, but it never turned me off from skating, only made me want to rebuild stronger. Also, I was always busy getting involved with other projects within skateboarding and never was never only just skating everyday. I’d say when I was younger I would skate almost everyday where as now I probably skate twice a week in a real session and a few times a week on a cruiser running 5boro errands around NY, avoiding the subway waiting or the annoyance of having to walk.
What do you do for a living?
I’ve been fortunate to have a good career run that’s allowed me to be around skating and may have possibly kept me on my board more than if I had some non involved skate life. I am 38, living in downtown Manhattan and running 5BORONYC, basically I do whatever it takes everyday 7 days a week to keep it running to support all of us contributing to it. I work a lot, and have worked a lot many years for other brands to get to this point in my life that’s allowing me to grow my own company. To simply say what I do, I run a skateboard company for a living, but in more detail, I work with people I believe in and do anything I can do to support them to help make 5boro operate and grow in a direction we collectively believe in. I like coming up with ideas for brands and like working with good people to see them come to life while making it the best experience for everyone…thats what I work hard for so I can do this for a living.
When you are not skating, how often do you think about skateboarding?
Funny, as much as my life is involved with skating, I don’t think about it that much. Like I don’t fall asleep anymore thinking about what trick at what spot I am going to do, maybe it’s because I don’t sleep anymore. You know what’s weird, I think about doing front rocks on these cobble stone quarterpipe-ish planters in Chinatown sometimes, like when I’m stressed out, skating that spot in my head calms me. Like when I was getting my wisdom teeth broken apart and ripped out in pieces I was thinking about skating this gnarly cobblestone spot.
How did skateboarding affect the direction of your life?
This is a good question as I never thought I would be skating or involved with skating this long in my life. I think for a lot of people my age, this is the case as when we were growing up skateboarding wasn’t by any means taken seriously by our parents or teachers and by no means was an option to survive in this world. So throughout my life skating has had different levels of of influence on the direction of my life. At one point in the 90’s skating was going through a transition that led me to got back to school after realizing I am not going to be a pro skater and was failing at trying to do a small start up skate company. I thought I would probably be done skating by 25, have a normal 9 to 5 job in New York and skating would eventually fade out for me due to the norms of society. But then I went to school, skated more than ever, and one thing led to the next that my experience in skating brought opportunities. I still see it as two different things, like I skate and I’ve built a career that happened to involve skateboarding but I guess its one thing sort of and therefore skating has RULED EVERYTHING AROUND ME.
What is the connection between skateboarding and creativity?
The simple answer is skateboarding is creative. To answer why skateboarding attracts people who pursue creative outlets in forms of art I think is simple. For my generation, skating, music and drawing were all wrapped up in one. The older guys skating I looked up to in my hometown were drawing stuff on their grip tape with paint markers, playing music in their garage or small clubs that used to exist in the city back then. I think of pro skateboarders like Neil Blender, The Gonz, Ed Templeton types that were just creative in general. They also used their art as graphics and lead them to developing amazing brands. Design, painting, photos; whatever the creative trade may be, can all be contributed to skateboarding which makes our scene so inspiring to many people.
More about Mark Nardelli
Mark Nardelli on The Berrics (part 1), Mark Nardelli on The Berrics (part 2)
Connect with Mark Nardelli
