Taking it to the Streets

Skateboarding is not a crime, but sliding a car is. Maybe the key to reducing arrests is giving hot-rodders a place to play.

- ELANA SCHERR

Automotive hooliganism is in the news. A spectator died during a street takeover in Kansas City, Missouri. Folks keep crashing Challengers into the newly opened Sixth Street Bridge in Los Angeles. Someone wrecked on a popular canyon road-which happens every weekend, but not always with media coverage.

Just because it's in the news doesn't mean it's new. A paper in Reading, Pennsylvania, reported that Harry Laird and Joseph Wells were disciplined for street racing on January 22. In 1879. The men were told to keep their horses to a walk. In a 1966 police sting in Los Angeles, the cops arrested 66 racers and impounded 29 cars, many of which were "unmistakably modified for racing." Brock Yates famously covered Detroit's street-racing scene for Car and Driver in the 1970s, and while the kids in the '80s and '90s had to work harder to spin the tires on their Malaise Era hand-me-downs, there was no shortage of concerned think pieces about the dangers of unsanctioned matchups. The news stories came fast and furious in the aughts and continue to the present day.