The Closure of a Skate Branding Museum
It Was Also A Burrito Place, I Guess
There’s a burrito place on the corner of Graham and Metropolitan in Williamsburg that’s been there for a long time. I’m legitimately not even sure how long, but it’s one of those places that’s been quietly embedded into the neighborhood without ever becoming anyone’s favorite restaurant. The food is fine. It’s cheap, (which for this neighborhood is a blessing) and it’s reliable. A solid 6 out of 10. I don’t think I even knew that it was called El Loco Burrito until I saw a ‘For Lease’ sign in the window.
And, to state the painfully obvious, it’s closing.
Should I be sadder than I am? Maybe. However, the food wasn’t good enough for me to be truly sad. What always made this place interesting to me was the inside. Specifically, the walls.
The place is covered in remnants of an older Williamsburg — stickers, tags, scraps of skateboarding & general culture embedded in amber from somewhere around 2005 to 2010. This is from back when the neighborhood was in a strange transitional phase: rapidly gentrifying, but still unmistakably held together by artists, skaters, musicians, and people figuring things out in *much* cheaper apartments. Before the neighborhood became self-aware. I’m by no means a local, but I’ve been here long enough to see a lot of changes, and this place always brought me back in time.
Skateboarding, especially, felt central to the identity of that era. You can still see evidence of it in this burrito spot. Layers of stickers from skate companies, bands, and small businesses adorn the walls, stacked on top of each other like geological sediment. There are some heavy hitters - an OLD 5Boro logo, Baker team sharpie portraits, an Etnies sticker made for the strip club in Tampa - they really span the gamut. There’s one for Metrospective, NYC’s first skate website, and even one of the original Village Psychic stickers c. 2015.
That’s what I’ll miss about this place. Not the burritos. Not the tacos. Just the feeling of being able to walk in every now and then and briefly reconnect with a neighborhood that was weirder, cheaper, and more connected to skating as a cultural pillar. I’d order something out of obligation, sit there for a minute, and look at the walls.
This is less a eulogy for a restaurant and more an acknowledgment of a landmark. Not an institution in the traditional sense, maybe, but an institution nonetheless. A small, slightly grimy time capsule hiding in plain sight on Graham Avenue.
More sticker examples below:
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