NATAS KAUPAS: THE KID WHO TURNED THE CITY INTO A SKATEPARK

The Strange Name, the Panther, the Fire Hydrant, 101 Skateboards and the Birth of Modern Street Skating

There are skateboarders who invent tricks.

There are skateboarders who win contests.

There are skateboarders who sell a million boards.

And occasionally someone comes along who changes what skateboarders are capable of seeing.

Natas Kaupas was one of those people.

Before modern street skating had established its rules, vocabulary and enormous catalog of tricks, Natas was roaming the streets of Santa Monica discovering that almost anything could become skateable if you approached it with sufficient imagination and disregard for its manufacturer's intended purpose.

Walls.

Curbs.

Benches.

Handrails.

Driveways.

Poles.

Fire hydrants.

The city had been designed by architects.

Natas discovered the architects had accidentally built a skateboard park.

That realization helped change skateboarding forever.

CHAPTER ONE

A Kid Named Natas

Natas Kaupas was born March 23, 1969, and grew up in South Santa Monica, California.

His family was Lithuanian.

And almost immediately we encounter one of the strangest coincidences in skateboarding history:

NATAS

Turn it around:

SATAN

You couldn't have designed a better name for an underground skateboard celebrity during the Satanic Panic era if you had locked a room full of punk-rock marketing executives inside a Hot Topic for three weeks.

But it wasn't created as a skateboard gimmick.

Natas was his actual name.

The precise Lithuanian explanation behind it has been told somewhat differently over the years, and some of the familiar skate-lore explanations are linguistically questionable. What matters historically is that Kaupas himself explained that the name came from his Lithuanian family background.

Then American culture discovered the backwards spelling.

And things became weird.

SATAN ON A SKATEBOARD?

To understand why this mattered, you have to remember America in the 1980s.

Heavy metal records were supposedly hiding satanic messages.

Dungeons & Dragons was corrupting children.

Punk rock was terrifying parents.

Skateboarding already carried imagery involving skulls, skeletons, demons, flames, daggers and monsters.

Then here comes a professional skateboarder named:

NATAS.

Parents reversed the letters.

SATAN.

Case closed.

Some schools and skate shops reportedly reacted to merchandise carrying his name, and the controversy became part of the mythology surrounding him.

It is almost impossible to imagine a more perfect collision between teenage skateboard culture and 1980s American moral panic.

The adults saw Satan.

Skateboarders saw Natas.

And Natas mostly wanted to skate.

CHAPTER TWO

Santa Monica Airlines

Natas became closely associated with Santa Monica Airlines, or SMA.

SMA came out of the same larger Southern California ecosystem that produced some of skateboarding's most important companies, personalities and visual traditions.

Natas became its defining professional.

This matters because professional skateboarding in the early and middle 1980s was still heavily dominated by transition skating.

Halfpipes.

Pools.

Bowls.

Vert ramps.

Contest runs.

Street skating existed, certainly. Skateboarders had been riding streets since skateboarding began.

But modern street skateboarding had not yet fully become its own dominant discipline.

Natas arrived during that transformation.

And instead of waiting for somebody to construct something for him to skate, he looked at what already existed.

That was the breakthrough.

CHAPTER THREE

Skateboarding Before the Street Revolution

Modern skateboarders grow up in a world where street skating seems inevitable.

Of course you grind a ledge.

Of course you ollie stairs.

Of course you boardslide a handrail.

Of course you wallride.

Of course you skate a loading dock.

But none of these things were inevitable.

Skateboarding had to discover them.

Every generation inherited a slightly larger vocabulary from the previous one.

Alan Gelfand's development of the ollie on transition helped create a fundamental movement.

Rodney Mullen adapted and radically expanded the ollie and flip-trick vocabulary on flat ground.

Then skateboarders such as Natas Kaupas and Mark Gonzales began asking:

What happens if we take these ideas into the city?

That question detonated.

The ollie allowed the skateboarder to escape the ground without grabbing the board.

Once that became possible, the city changed.

Curbs weren't barriers anymore.

You could ollie onto them.

Benches weren't furniture.

You could skate them.

Walls weren't boundaries.

You could ride them.

Handrails weren't safety equipment.

Well...

The insurance companies weren't going to enjoy what happened next.

CHAPTER FOUR

Natas and the Gonz

If modern street skateboarding has founding fathers, two names appear repeatedly:

Natas Kaupas

and

Mark Gonzales.

Trying to determine which one "invented street skating" misses the point.

Street skating evolved through many skateboarders.

But Natas and Gonz were two of the people who caused the evolutionary explosion.

They approached skating differently.

The Gonz often looked improvisational, loose and almost surreal.

Natas looked powerful.

Fast.

Aggressive.

Controlled.

He had huge ollies for the era and an unusual ability to turn architectural features into obstacles.

They were not merely performing new tricks.

They were expanding the definition of terrain.

That distinction is enormous.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Wallride

One of the moves most strongly associated with early Natas footage is the wallride.

Again, consider how strange this must have appeared.

A skateboard rolls horizontally.

A wall is vertical.

Those two facts would appear to end the discussion.

Natas disagreed.

He attacked walls.

The wall became another surface.

And suddenly skateboarders started looking at buildings differently.

A slanted wall was interesting.

A smooth wall was interesting.

A bank leading toward a wall was extremely interesting.

Architecture developed a second meaning.

There was the meaning intended by the architect.

And then there was the meaning discovered by the skateboarder.

CHAPTER SIX

Breaking the Handrail Barrier

Natas and Gonz were also crucial figures in the early development of handrail skating.

Today handrail skating has reached almost absurd technical levels.

Skaters flip into rails.

Flip out.

Slide enormous rails.

Grind kinked rails.

Attack rails that look less like skateboard obstacles and more like industrial plumbing accidents.

But somebody had to look at a handrail for the first time and think:

That.

The leap from curb skating to handrail skating represented something profound.

It brought skateboarding into direct confrontation with architecture.

You weren't merely riding across the city anymore.

You were climbing onto it.

Sliding down it.

Jumping over it.

Reinterpreting it.

Modern street skating was taking shape.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Fire Hydrant

And then there was the fire hydrant.

This is where Natas entered skateboarding mythology.

In Streets on Fire, released by Santa Cruz in 1989, Natas ollied onto a fire hydrant and spun around on top of it.

The maneuver became known as:

THE NATAS SPIN.

Pause for a moment and appreciate how ridiculous this idea is.

A fire hydrant has almost nothing suggesting:

PLEASE PUT A SKATEBOARD HERE.

It is narrow.

Rounded.

Metal.

Awkward.

Its purpose is preventing neighborhoods from burning down.

Natas looked at one and apparently saw a skate obstacle.

He ollied onto the top and rotated.

It became one of the most recognizable tricks of the era.

But the Natas Spin mattered beyond its difficulty.

It demonstrated a philosophy:

Anything might be skateable.

That's the revolutionary idea.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Streets on Fire

The 1989 Santa Cruz video Streets on Fire became one of the important documents of the emerging street-skating revolution.

Natas' section showed skateboarders interacting with ordinary urban terrain:

curbs,

walls,

handrails,

driveways,

poles,

hydrants,

and whatever else happened to be available.

For young skateboarders watching VHS tapes far away from California, footage like this was revelation.

Remember, there was no YouTube.

No Instagram.

No TikTok.

No endless stream of skate clips appearing every seventeen seconds.

Skate videos were precious objects.

Someone got the tape.

Everyone gathered.

The VCR swallowed it.

Then:

PLAY.

REWIND.

PLAY.

PAUSE.

REWIND.

"What did he just do?"

PLAY.

REWIND.

Then everyone grabbed their boards and went outside.

Skate videos were underground textbooks.

And Natas was teaching a new language.

CHAPTER NINE

The Panther

Then we arrive at another crucial part of the Natas mythology:

the Panther.

The Natas Panther boards produced through Santa Monica Airlines became some of the most recognizable skateboard graphics of their era.

There wasn't just one Panther graphic frozen forever in time.

The Panther imagery evolved through different versions and artists during Natas' SMA years.

Artists associated with versions of the Panther imagery included figures from the extraordinarily fertile Santa Cruz/NHS graphic world, including Jim Phillips and others.

That distinction matters because skateboard graphics were becoming an art form of their own.

The skateboard deck wasn't merely sporting equipment.

It was a moving poster.

A portable underground art gallery.

And the Natas Panther was perfect material.

A snarling animal.

Natas' mysterious name.

Aggressive typography.

Street skating.

Teenagers.

Moral panic.

You couldn't ask for better mythology.

CHAPTER TEN

When Skateboards Became Identity

This was the golden age of the pro-model skateboard graphic.

Your board said something about you.

A Powell Peralta deck communicated one identity.

Santa Cruz communicated another.

Vision another.

SMA another.

Later World Industries would blow the doors off the entire system.

Deck graphics became cultural signals.

Kids memorized them.

Drew them in notebooks.

Put stickers on school binders.

Cut advertisements from magazines.

The board graphic connected the skateboarder, artist and company into a single identity.

Natas understood this visual world unusually well.

Because he wasn't merely interested in skateboarding.

He was interested in design.

That becomes very important later.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Pro Shoe Revolution

Another remarkable Natas milestone happened through Etnies.

In the late 1980s, Natas became associated with one of skateboarding's earliest true signature pro shoes.

That sounds normal now.

Today virtually every major skate-shoe company revolves around professional endorsements and signature models.

But somebody had to establish that business model.

The idea was simple but transformative:

Don't merely have skateboarders wear your shoes.

Build a shoe around a skateboarder's identity.

Natas' involvement also extended into design and marketing.

Once again we see the same pattern.

He wasn't merely the athlete in the photograph.

He cared about the object.

The design.

The image.

The culture around it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Skateboarding Collapses

Then skateboarding did what skateboarding repeatedly does.

It crashed.

Around the beginning of the 1990s, the enormous 1980s skate boom collapsed.

Companies disappeared.

Vert skating lost cultural dominance.

Board shapes changed rapidly.

Wheels became smaller.

Street skating became increasingly technical.

The industry shrank.

To outsiders, skateboarding looked dead again.

But underground, something extraordinary was happening.

The street-skating revolution Natas had helped begin was mutating into an entirely new form.

And Natas was about to participate in that revolution from another direction.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Enter Steve Rocco

Steve Rocco had built World Industries into one of skateboarding's great disruptive forces.

Rocco understood something important:

The old skate establishment was vulnerable.

Young street skateboarders didn't necessarily want to inherit the existing culture.

They wanted their own companies.

Their own graphics.

Their own humor.

Their own riders.

Their own rules.

Around 1991, Rocco approached Natas about starting a skateboard company.

Natas left SMA.

The result was:

101 SKATEBOARDS.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

101

101 became another expression of Natas' creative personality.

It existed within the broader World Industries orbit during one of the strangest and most creatively explosive periods in skateboarding history.

The early 1990s were wild.

Graphics became provocative.

Sometimes offensive.

Sometimes brilliant.

Sometimes deliberately juvenile.

Sometimes all four simultaneously.

Companies mocked one another.

Advertisements became cultural warfare.

Skateboarding was rebuilding itself after the crash.

101 developed its own identity within that chaos.

And Natas had something he had wanted:

A place where skating and graphic design could meet.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The 101 Team

The list of skateboarders associated with 101 over its history reads like a preview of where street skating was heading.

Among the names connected with the company were skateboarders such as:

Gabriel Rodriguez

Eric Koston

Gino Iannucci

Jason Dill

Kris Markovich

Adam McNatt

and others who would become important figures in the next generation of street skating.

This is another dimension of Natas' influence.

First he helped define what street skating could be.

Then he helped create a company that provided space for younger street skateboarders.

Influence became infrastructure.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Injury and Reinvention

Natas' skating career was interrupted by serious ankle problems during the early 1990s.

But this is where his story becomes especially interesting.

Many professional athletes have difficulty when their bodies stop cooperating.

Their entire identity has been constructed around performance.

Natas had another language available.

Design.

He moved deeper into graphic design, art direction and creative work.

That transition wasn't completely separate from skateboarding.

It was an extension of something that had always been there.

Natas had spent his skating career reinterpreting physical objects.

Now he increasingly interpreted visual ones.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Natas the Designer

Natas eventually became known not simply as a legendary skateboarder but as a creative director and designer.

His career included work connected with major action-sports brands and fashion.

He brought something unusual to those jobs.

He understood subculture from the inside.

There is an enormous difference between someone studying skateboard culture and someone who helped create skateboard culture.

Natas understood:

graphics,

logos,

photography,

advertising,

product design,

street culture,

fashion,

music,

and the strange psychological relationship skateboarders develop with brands.

He had lived through the transformation of skateboard companies from manufacturers into cultural identities.

That knowledge was valuable.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

FUCT

Natas also became connected to another important piece of underground streetwear history through FUCT, created with Erik Brunetti.

FUCT emerged during the early 1990s and became influential in the development of provocative streetwear.

The name itself tells you roughly how interested the brand was in behaving politely.

This intersection between skateboarding, graphic design and streetwear would become enormously important.

Decades later, the relationship seems obvious.

Supreme.

Palace.

Stüssy.

Independent skate brands.

Sneaker culture.

Street fashion.

Art collaborations.

But the borders between these worlds had to be broken down.

Natas was present during that period when skateboarding's visual language began leaking into fashion and streetwear.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Invisible Revolution

Here's the fascinating thing about Natas.

Many younger skateboarders may not consciously imitate him.

They don't need to.

His ideas have become embedded in skateboarding itself.

When someone ollies onto a strange object...

When someone wallrides an unexpected surface...

When someone invents a trick based on an architectural feature nobody has skated before...

When someone treats a skateboard graphic as serious artwork...

When a professional skateboarder becomes a designer...

When a skate company behaves like an art collective...

Some fragment of the world Natas helped build is still operating.

The greatest cultural influence eventually becomes invisible.

Everyone forgets the world before it existed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Skateboarder as Urban Hacker

There is a useful way of understanding what Natas did.

He hacked architecture.

Not with computers.

With urethane wheels.

Architecture contains instructions.

A bench tells you:

SIT.

A staircase tells you:

WALK.

A handrail tells you:

HOLD.

A wall tells you:

STOP.

A fire hydrant tells you:

PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEAVE THE MUNICIPAL WATER SYSTEM ALONE.

The skateboarder reads different instructions.

BENCH:

GRIND.

STAIRS:

OLLIE.

HANDRAIL:

SLIDE.

WALL:

RIDE.

FIRE HYDRANT:

SPIN.

That's hacking in the broadest sense.

Take a system.

Understand its properties.

Then use those properties in a way its designer never anticipated.

Natas was an urban hacker.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Why Natas and Rodney Mullen Are Connected

Rodney Mullen and Natas represent different pieces of the street-skating revolution.

Mullen developed an extraordinary vocabulary of flatground tricks.

Natas helped take the emerging vocabulary of ollies and street maneuvers and smash it into architecture.

You could roughly think of it this way:

Mullen helped develop the language.

Natas helped discover where that language could be spoken.

Then later generations combined everything.

Flip tricks met ledges.

Flip tricks met stairs.

Flip tricks met rails.

Technical flatground skating fused with urban architecture.

Modern street skating emerged from the collision.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Why Natas and Gonz Matter Together

Mark Gonzales brought another essential ingredient:

radical improvisation.

Gonz seemed capable of looking at something nobody considered skateable and immediately imagining a line through it.

Natas shared that architectural imagination but expressed it differently.

Together, they expanded the skateboarder's field of vision.

This is why arguments over which one "invented street skating" aren't particularly useful.

Culture doesn't usually work that way.

It's closer to an electrical storm.

Ideas are moving everywhere.

Then lightning hits several places.

Natas was one of the biggest bolts.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

1984–1989: Five Years That Changed Everything

If you want to understand the magnitude of the transformation, study roughly the middle to late 1980s.

At the beginning of that period, vert skating still occupied the throne.

By the end, street skating had become an enormous creative force.

Natas was there during the entire transition.

His skating demonstrated:

powerful ollies,

wallrides,

street obstacles,

handrails,

unusual terrain,

and the fire-hydrant spin.

The Skateboarding Hall of Fame specifically identifies the period from 1984 through 1989 as crucial to Natas' influence on modern street skating.

Five years.

That's astonishingly fast.

Skateboarding went through a conceptual mutation.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Videos

If you want to understand Natas rather than simply read about him, seek out his old footage.

Important pieces of his video legacy include material connected with:

Streets on Fire

Speed Freaks

Sick Boys

and instructional/street-skating footage featuring Natas.

Don't watch them expecting contemporary technical skating.

Watch the surroundings.

Look at the boards.

Look at the wheels.

Look at the shoes.

Look at what he's skating.

Then remember:

There wasn't a giant library of previous street footage showing him exactly what to do.

Somebody had to discover these possibilities.

That's what makes old skate footage so valuable.

You're watching the vocabulary being invented.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Boards Changed Too

Natas' career also spans one of the most interesting periods in skateboard deck evolution.

Early and mid-1980s boards were often wide.

Distinctively shaped.

Large noses were not yet universal.

Tail shapes varied.

Wheel wells and dramatic silhouettes were common.

Graphics were enormous.

Then street skating began exerting evolutionary pressure on skateboard design.

Skaters wanted better noses.

More functional kicks.

More symmetrical behavior.

Lighter setups.

Smaller wheels.

Eventually the popsicle shape emerged as the dominant street skateboard.

Natas' career sits directly across that transition.

His early SMA boards belong to the glorious shaped-deck era.

101 arrived closer to the world that produced modern street decks.

His boards therefore tell part of skateboarding's technological history even when they're hanging silently on a collector's wall.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Panther as Artifact

This is why vintage Natas boards command such attention from collectors.

They're not simply old skateboards.

They're artifacts from a conceptual revolution.

A Natas Panther hanging on a wall represents:

1980s skateboarding,

Santa Monica,

SMA,

skate graphics,

the Satan-name controversy,

the emergence of street skating,

and one of skateboarding's most influential personalities.

It's wood.

Glue.

Ink.

History.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Recognition

In 2005, Natas received the Legend Award at the TransWorld Skateboarding Awards.

Then in 2014, he was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame.

By then, the verdict was no longer controversial.

The strange kid from Santa Monica with the backwards-Satan name had become one of skateboarding's foundational figures.

But there's something wonderfully appropriate about skateboarding eventually building a Hall of Fame for people who spent their youth getting kicked out of parking lots.

History has a sense of humor.

NATAS KAUPAS: A ROUGH TIMELINE

1969

Natas Kaupas is born in California.

Early 1980s

He develops his skating in and around South Santa Monica.

Mid-1980s

Natas emerges through Santa Monica Airlines and begins attracting serious attention for his powerful, inventive approach to street skating.

1984–1989

The crucial period in which Natas and contemporaries such as Mark Gonzales dramatically expand modern street skating.

Mid-to-late 1980s

The Natas Panther becomes one of skateboarding's iconic pro-model graphic families.

1987 era

Natas becomes associated with an early Etnies signature pro shoe, an important development in skate footwear history.

1989

Streets on Fire appears.

The fire-hydrant spin becomes immortalized.

The Natas Spin enters skateboarding vocabulary.

Early 1990s

The 1980s skate boom collapses while technical street skating rapidly evolves.

1991

Natas leaves SMA and launches 101 Skateboards within Steve Rocco's World Industries orbit.

Early 1990s

101 develops into an influential street-skating brand and home for an extraordinary group of emerging skateboarders.

1990s

Injury limits Natas' professional skating.

His design and creative-directing career expands.

Later years

Natas continues working within art, design, fashion and board-sports culture.

2005

He receives TransWorld's Legend Award.

2014

Natas Kaupas enters the Skateboarding Hall of Fame.

THE NATAS FAMILY TREE

If we were drawing the history of modern street skateboarding as a giant evolutionary tree, Natas would sit near one of the major branching points.

Behind him:

surfing

↓

sidewalk skating

↓

pools and banks

↓

vert

↓

Alan Gelfand's ollie

↓

Rodney Mullen's flatground revolution

↓

NATAS + GONZ + THE STREET REVOLUTION

↓

handrails

↓

ledges

↓

stairs

↓

technical street skating

↓

modern skate videos

↓

street plazas

↓

today's almost incomprehensibly technical skating.

That's why Natas matters.

He sits near the hinge.

THE MOST IMPORTANT NATAS TRICK WASN'T A TRICK

People naturally associate him with the Natas Spin.

But I don't think that's his most important contribution.

His most important contribution was something invisible:

permission.

Permission to skate something nobody else considered skateable.

Permission to invent.

Permission to treat architecture incorrectly.

Permission to mix skating and graphic design.

Permission to build your own company.

Permission to develop an identity that didn't resemble everyone else's.

Permission to look at the city sideways.

That attitude became one of skateboarding's central values.

THE SECRET CITY

Once you've skateboarded for a while, something strange happens.

You begin living in two cities simultaneously.

There is the normal city.

People see:

banks.

schools.

churches.

parking lots.

courthouses.

libraries.

shopping centers.

office buildings.

Then there's the skateboarder's city.

You see:

three-stair.

waxed curb.

ledge.

bank.

wall.

gap.

rail.

transition.

manual pad.

perfect loading dock.

terrible pavement.

security guard.

run.

Suddenly every trip becomes reconnaissance.

You aren't merely traveling through architecture.

You're reading it.

Natas Kaupas helped teach skateboarders how to read that second city.

NATAS KAUPAS AND THE CENTRAL IDEA OF SKATEBOARDING

This is where his story becomes larger than skateboarding.

Natas embodies something essential about creativity.

The world arrives with instructions attached.

Use this object this way.

Follow this path.

Respect this boundary.

Do not climb.

Do not touch.

Do not enter.

Do not skate.

Creative people occasionally look at those instructions and ask:

Why?

Not because every rule is stupid.

Fire hydrants should probably continue functioning.

But because objects often contain possibilities their creators never imagined.

That's invention.

Musicians do it with sound.

Artists do it with images.

Hackers do it with systems.

Skateboarders do it with architecture.

Natas did it with a piece of wood and four wheels.

NATAS WASN'T JUST SKATING THE CITY

He was editing it.

A wall gained another function.

A curb gained another function.

A rail gained another function.

A hydrant gained an extremely questionable additional function.

Suddenly architecture contained secret possibilities.

Once other skateboarders saw them, they couldn't unsee them.

That may be the clearest definition of cultural influence:

Someone shows you something that was always there, and afterward you can never look at it the old way again.

Natas Kaupas did that to the city.

Millions of skateboarders are still skating through the world he discovered.

And somewhere right now, some kid is rolling down a sidewalk, staring at an object no skateboarder has ever touched before.

Everyone else sees street furniture.

The kid sees a possibility.

That's Natas' real legacy.

Look again.

There's probably something there.