Ah, the Howard House…
An infamous skate house in San Francisco, from a time when a bunch of skate rats without proper jobs could afford to rent one. And a time when so, so many skaters were moving to town. My memory is a bit hazy, but I think the HH lasted from about 1996-2004. The house was on Howard and 12th in what was then a pretty dingy, desolate corner of the city. The saga began when some art students rented it out. They went to an expensive art school, so I think they were all pretty well off and probably not used to cleaning up after themselves. This was their first time living away from home, so the house got trashed pretty quickly. Anyway, one of those pioneers was a skater, and through him, more and more skaters ended up moving in. We had a good crew and a good run. A lot of talented people lived there at one time or another; it was actually kind of a magical place, in retrospect.
The house was a mess. There were piles of skate mags and VHS tapes everywhere. For years, our coffee table was a wooden pallet. There was a hole in the bathroom floor, and at one point we were completely infested with mice.
And, as you can see, we had quite a lot of parties. With hundreds of young, irresponsible skaters in town, they were usually pretty entertaining. Usually, too many people would show up and the inevitable sprawl-into-the-street would bring the inevitable Cop shutdown. At one, the fire escape collapsed under the weight of humans. Sometimes, in an effort to be more mature and classy, we would have a ‘Cocktail Party’. Which just meant getting a couple of the biggest, nastiest bottles of booze available, and some budget cola and fake orange juice, telling people to ‘dress up’, and making cocktails. Of course, only the girls actually dressed up, and the parties were as messy as ever. One of my housemates even introduced the somewhat unorthodox new cocktail party tradition of eating live goldfish from the tank in the kitchen. Given their living conditions, this may have been the humane way out, poor creatures…
I suppose wherever you live when you are in your early 20’s and passionate about something (in this case, skateboarding) or just about life in general, this will always be a significant time and place in your memory. And prone to attacks of sentimentality as I am, I really had no intention of delving into these pictures. But a few months ago, I finally got around to editing together ‘The Howard House Video’; using skate footage from ’03/’04 which had been the beginnings of our literal in-house production - one which was cut short by the dissolution of our household. You can find the video on the interweb. (As I remarked- “I realized I was sitting on a full, unseen Ocean Howell part, and who am I to deprive the world of that?!”)
Anyway, I ended up making a zine of Howard House photos to go with the physical DVD of the video, and finding many half-forgotten snap-shots that had, as photos tend to do, become somehow more significant with age and fresh eyes.
Here, then, are some of those pictures. I hope you enjoy them; cheers.
