Skateboarders Won

NEW YORK — In July 1995, artist Maura Sheehan installed a skateable sculpture in the anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge, over on the Brooklyn side. Sheehan became fascinated with skateboarders after observing large groups of them careening through the streets downtown in the era before 9/11.

Much of that part of the city was still accessible to herds of rule-bending youths. “Their building of community is really a profound thing,” she said of the eclectic groups of skaters she would encounter. “It forces discourse and interaction.”

The hidden work — a halfpipe that she found through a group of “cowboy” skaters traveling cross-country from California, who reconstructed it in every city they stopped in — attracted more than just skaters. Sheehan recalled daredevils and spectators alike being drawn to the structure. “It really was a living social organism,” she said.

Steve Rodriguez, 46, a professional skateboarder and the owner of 5boro Skateboards, helped build Sheehan’s ramp in 1995. A little more than a decade later, on the Manhattan side of the bridge, he helped organize the city’s skate community to save a portion of the so-called Brooklyn Banks, a popular spot for local skaters at the time. In this case, the city promised to eventually turn part of the area into a proper skate park.

Skateboarding had gone from renegade to recreation. After decades of commandeering streets, sidewalks, parking lots and public sculptures, skaters entered the mainstream. Now New York City, the United States and the world at large have all seen a surge of skate park development. With skateboarding entering the Olympic Games in 2020, the international growth of skate parks is likely only beginning.

“A lot of funding for recreation is based off the Olympics, so we’re going to see a lot more skate parks and skate facilities built worldwide,” said Thomas Barker, executive director of the International Association of Skateboard Companies.

Rodriguez found that the grass-roots effort was the beginning of a new relationship with local government. He has since worked with the Department of Transportation, which controls all the land under bridges in New York, as well as the Parks Department, to build a number of skate parks around the city — creations that have quietly multiplied across the boroughs, becoming a defining piece of the modern urban landscape.

“Skateboarding to me has always been social,” Rodriguez said. “Now even more so because it’s these dedicated spaces just made for that.”

In Harlem, a new skate park opened at Thomas Jefferson Park in September. The Bronx will see the completion of Williamsbridge Oval Skatepark in early 2019. Rodriguez recently worked on designs for a skate park under construction near the refurbished Kosciuszko Bridge. These new entrants follow the construction of Golconda Skatepark in Downtown Brooklyn, in 2016, and Cooper Skatepark in Bushwick the same year.

In Los Angeles, the highly regarded Stoner Skate Plaza opened in 2010 and features recreated elements of bygone local skate spots. Architect Anthony Bracali teamed up with skateboarders in Philadelphia for the 2.5-acre Paine’s Park, completed in 2013. The Seattle Skate Park Advisory Committee has spent the past decade advocating skate parks in that city, arguing that Seattle’s more than 29,000 skaters needed dedicated space to skate. Today, the city is home to a growing number of skate parks, as well as more than a dozen designated skate spots and “skate dots”: individual obstacles spread across the city designed for people to skate.

The Tony Hawk Foundation, a leading partner in the construction of skate parks in the United States, estimates that there are roughly 3,500 skate parks in the country — still about a third of what it says the country needs.

“We would like to ultimately see a skate park in every neighborhood, or for every neighborhood, so that the skate park could take on sort of provincial pride,” said Peter Whitley, programs director for the foundation.

In a different time, hoping for city officials to get on board with building a skate park seemed like an impossible task. Whitley said a great deal of NIMBYism once plagued developments.

But aging Gen X grew up alongside skateboarding’s ascent in popular culture, from Bart Simpson plonking down onto the roof of the family car in the opening sequence of “The Simpsons” to blockbuster video game franchises such as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Skateboarding is no longer something people fear. The skate punk of the late 1980s is now a suburban dad. Across runways, and in music videos and film, subtle influences of skate culture are noticeable. Everyone wears Vans sneakers.

“This is a cultural touchstone for a whole generation of people that didn’t exist before,” Whitley said. “My generation of people in their 50s and 40s, who grew up with skateboarding as a cultural marker don’t have that same kind of animosity toward it or suspicion about it.” The growing acceptance of skateboarding hasn’t made skate park development simple. Whitley points to municipal budget shortages as a constant source of frustration and Rodriguez laments the myriad parks built without proper skater input or without considering the landscape. He said that the scattered prefabricated obstacles installed at Thomas Jefferson Park in Harlem represent a missed opportunity. “It’s like, how long have these kids been waiting for a skate park? And that’s what they got,” Rodriguez said.

But there is no doubt a peculiar and magnetic pull to public skate parks. They look unlike anything typically built by municipalities, with sloping ramps and oblong bowls that appear like sculpture jutting out of the terrain.

Except these sculptures are alive. Walk by any local skate park and you’ll bear witness to young people propelling themselves off one of these concrete monuments into another, or into the street. They have become the backdrop for an entire genre of video on Instagram, where skaters are known to publish edits at their local skate parks, taking turns filming each other on smartphones.

Theodore Barrow, assistant curator at the Hudson River Museum, runs a satirical Instagram account called @feedback_ts, where he critiques submitted video clips from skate parks. Barrow, who came up as a skateboarder in the ‘90s, is often as acerbic as he is absurd — a relentlessly perceptive older brother.

For a long time, skate parks were looked down upon by skaters who preferred finding challenges, often illegally, in the streets. Filming at a skate park was akin to wearing a band’s T-shirt to its concert or wearing a mismatched tracksuit. “Skate parks have always been designed to contain an activity that is about roaming, and often dangerous, or at least unlawful trespassing,” Barrow said.

But today’s skaters seem less resistant to the idea of using these purpose-built spaces, even if it does translate to less time in the streets. One reason may be how much easier it is to show off at a skate park.

Barrow explained that skateboarding has always thrived on an element of performance. Skate parks, coupled with the immediacy of social media, have created a distinctly modern dynamic. “As skate parks themselves have proliferated, they have become more central to that idea of performance, both fashionable and athletic,” Barrow wrote.

Iain Borden, a professor of architecture and urban culture at University College in London, wrote the book “Skateboarding, Space, and the City” in 2000. He also sees the growth of skate parks as a social phenomenon. “They’re places of social exchange,” he said. “You could argue that they’re not sports facilities, they’re social landscapes in which skateboarding and riding and scootering and blading are some of the activities that you might do.”

He recalled the scene at a soft opening for a new skate park in South London: a whole pile of citizens, from many races and sexual orientations, coming together like in a rendering for some idealized plaza. “You just look at it and you think, ‘Oh my God, these are extraordinary places,'” Borden said. “And people were talking to each other as well. It wasn’t a shopping street where they are all walking past each other.” On an unseasonably warm afternoon in March, Zelda Santiago, 26, a part-time model who grew up in Georgia, rode through Coleman Skatepark on the Lower East Side. The park was renovated in 2011 with help from Rodriguez and Nike. (Good skate park design, Rodriguez said, is defined by the ability of skaters to flow through the park without stopping, each obstacle a logical, and playful, distance apart.)

With another young skater seated on a nearby bench serving as his videographer, Santiago pushed off a small concrete slope into a dense metal fence, gliding across the top before landing back into the slope — a “wallride” in skater’s parlance. It’s one of the more graceful maneuvers one can perform at the park. And with a mop of dark curly hair, Santiago, who wore large corduroy trousers and Italian loafers, looked like a surfer in church clothes, which is to say he looked very good.

“It gets a lot of kids away from trouble,” he said of skate parks popping up around the city. “If the park is closer, your instincts will be to go skate, versus whatever it is that could get you locked up.”

Skate parks do have the potential to serve as tools for neighborhood redevelopment. The area under the Burnside Bridge, in Portland, Oregon, was a hotbed of illegal activity before a group of skateboarders, in the early ‘90s, began constructing concrete ramps at the site, eventually earning the blessing of the city.

Today, the skate park, known as Burnside, is at the center of a wave of gentrification hitting the region. “The same way that artists will take over disused warehouses and make them creative and trendy,” Borden said, “skate parks and skateboarding bring creativity to an urban environment.”

Unlike other traditional harbingers of transformation, like coffee shops and expensive clothing stores, skate parks offer something egalitarian. In liberal societies such as Copenhagen, where local officials seek out the advice of skateboarders when designing public plazas, skate parks represent a progressive viewpoint on how to engage with public space. What started with independent groups of skaters cadging together DIY skate parks out of concrete and scrap wood grew into a movement to make the entire city a skate park.

The CPH Open, an annual skateboarding competition that invites skaters from around the world to skate the streets of Copenhagen, is the work of a committee made up of local skaters and has the support of city officials. Simon Strange, a member of the left-leaning Social Democrats on the city council, pushed for the city to help fund the event.

In Lagos, Nigeria, a group of resourceful youths recently installed a halfpipe for a one-day event in the Victoria Island area of the city; Morocco recently saw the construction of a concrete skate park, produced through a community partnership with the nonprofit Make Skate Life; in Kabul, Afghanistan, a skate park doubles as a space for young women to learn, thanks to Skateistan, a nongovernmental organization; Shangilia, in Kenya, became the first skate park in East Africa, with support from the nonprofit Skate Aid. And in South Korea, Borden said, young people responding to rigid expectations from adults have centered much of their lives on the skate park. Sometimes they cook dinners there.

But what could it say about the times that skate parks have come to be accepted by those in power?

“There is an idea that the kinds of things that skateboarding teaches people, it’s exactly those kinds of values, of robustness and confidence and independence, that neoliberal society wants to produce in its citizens,” Borden said. “There is an argument that skateboarding and skate parks are neoliberal training grounds.” Maybe!