Remembering the Lost Sneaker Store History of NYC

Take a trip down memory lane.

1.

by Brendan Dunne

Ever pick up a pair of quickstrikes from Nort/Recon on Lafayette? Or been to the NIKEiD design studio at 255 Elizabeth?

Spots like those, now defunct, were instrumental in birthing the collector-focused sneaker retail wave of the new millennium. Few of them survive today, and many of these shops' heydays predated the era when every single spot and pop-up had a handful of blog entries detailing the space. Helping to fill in the gaps as far as NYC's sneaker retail history from the early 2000s is this Complex piece, which breaks down some of the most important shops of that era and even revisits them to see what's going on in the same spaces today.

Extra points to anyone who has been around long enough to remember all of these now-extinct sneaker spots.