When a snowstorm buried New York City in February 2014, filmmaker Casey Neistat grabbed a snowboard and had a Jeep tow him through the streets of Manhattan. His short film, "Snowboarding New York City", turned the city's snow-clogged avenues into a terrain park and was picked up within days by The Atlantic Cities and Curbed.
Snowboarding New York City, February 2014
The idea was simple. While most New Yorkers stayed indoors during the storm, Neistat was pulled along behind a moving Jeep through fresh snow on the city's streets. The footage shows him gliding beside traffic and parked vehicles on avenues that, for once, belonged to the snow. The Atlantic Cities summed it up: the "snow-pocalypse" did not keep everyone snuggled up indoors.
The film was posted on Neistat's YouTube channel in mid-February 2014 and shared widely online, including by Curbed on 14 February.
Who is Casey Neistat?
Casey Owen Neistat was born on 25 March 1981 in Gales Ferry, Connecticut, and built his career in New York as an independent filmmaker. With his brother Van he created The Neistat Brothers, an eight-episode autobiographical series that HBO bought in 2008 and aired from June 2010.
His big breakthrough online came in 2012 with "Make It Count". Nike asked him to make a film about its slogan, and instead he spent the whole budget travelling around the world with his friend Max Joseph. The film has passed 32 million views. On 26 March 2015 he began posting daily vlogs on YouTube, and he later co-founded the video app Beme, which CNN agreed to acquire in 2016.
The 2016 blizzard sequel
Neistat returned to the idea two years later. During the blizzard of January 2016 he again snowboarded through New York, towed behind a Jeep Wrangler, and released "Snowboarding With the NYPD". That film reached 6.5 million YouTube views in its first 24 hours. The 2014 film was the first run, a smaller and rougher version of a stunt that became one of his signature pieces.
Urban snowboarding and street safety
Being towed behind a vehicle on public roads is genuinely risky: there is traffic, hidden kerbs and ice under the fresh snow. Neistat's films were planned stunts with a driver at the wheel and a team behind the camera, and in 2016 they went out even as the city's storm travel ban approached. After a big snowfall, a city park with a gentle hill is the place to try a board.
For more urban snowboarding, see Dan Brisse’s rooftop snowboard sequence, or watch road-bike skills in unexpected settings.
Related reading
- Twelve North American Ski Destinations: Terrain and Trip Planning
- Nineteen Snowboarding Destinations to Research on a Budget
- Twenty-Five Ski Towns and Mountain Destinations Around the World
- A Lake Louise Snowboard Lap with Blayne Campbell
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