From Brooklyn to the Olympics, skateparks are booming all around the world

After decades of commandeering backstreets and parking lots, skateboarding is entering the mainstream. But parks are not just tools for urban development – they’re driving social change

From renegade to recreation: skateboarding will be an event at the Olympics for the first time in 2020 (Reuters)

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 says 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 travelling 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 says.

Steve Rodrigues, 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 organise 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 skatepark.

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 in skatepark development. With skateboarding entering the Olympic Games in 2020, the international growth of skateparks is likely only beginning.

Grassroots efforts are creating new relationships with local government, and building purpose-built spaces (Getty)

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

Rodrigues 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 skateparks 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,” Rodrigues says. “Now even more so because it’s these dedicated spaces just made for that.”

In Harlem, a new skatepark opened at Thomas Jefferson Park in September. The Bronx will see the completion of Williamsbridge Oval Skatepark in early 2019. Rodrigues recently worked on designs for a skatepark 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 Skatepark Advisory Committee has spent the past decade advocating skateparks 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 skateparks, as well as more than a dozen designated skate spots and “skate dots”: individual obstacles spread across the city designed for people to skate.

Once shunned, these spaces are becoming a popular and defining part of the modern urban landscape (Getty)

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

“We would like to ultimately see a skatepark in every neighbourhood, or for every neighbourhood, so that the skatepark could take on sort of provincial pride,” says Peter Whitley, programmes director for the foundation.

In a different time, hoping for city officials to get on board with building a skatepark seemed like an impossible task. Whitley says a great deal of NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”) once plagued developments.

But ageing generation 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 says. “My generation of people in their fifties and forties, who grew up with skateboarding as a cultural marker don’t have that same kind of animosity toward it or suspicion about it.”

Boarders have been working with the Department of Transport to repurpose the space under bridges (Reuters)

The growing acceptance of skateboarding hasn’t made skatepark development simple. Whitley points to municipal budget shortages as a constant source of frustration and Rodrigues laments the myriad parks built without proper skater input or without considering the landscape. He says 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 skatepark? And that’s what they got,” Rodrigues says.

But there is no doubt a peculiar and magnetic pull to public skateparks. 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 skatepark 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 skateparks, taking turns filming each other on smartphones.

Theodore Barrow, assistant curator at the Hudson River Museum, runs a satirical Instagram account called SwitchbackFeedback (@feedback_ts), where he critiques submitted video clips from skateparks. Barrow, who came up as a skateboarder in the 1990s, is often as acerbic as he is absurd – a relentlessly perceptive older brother.

“I’m old school, so I began my account under the premise that filming at skateparks was absurd anyway,” he writes in an email. “So the notion of a skatepark footage critic on Instagram was equally outrageous, it had to be a joke.”

The Tony Hawk Foundation has been pivotal in building parks and hosting competitions around the US (Getty)

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

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 skatepark.

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

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 skateparks as a social phenomenon. “They’re places of social exchange,” he says. “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 skatepark in south London: a whole pile of citizens, from many races and sexual orientations, coming together like in a rendering for some idealised plaza. “You just look at it and you think, ‘Oh my God, these are extraordinary places’,” Borden says. “And people were talking to each other as well. It wasn’t a shopping street where they are all walking past each other.”

The parks have also become a backdrop for an entire genre of Instagram videos for skaters to show off (Reuters)

On an unseasonably warm afternoon in March, Zelda Santiago, 26, a part-time model who grew up in Georgia, rides through Coleman Skatepark on the Lower East Side. The park was renovated in 2011 with help from Rodrigues and Nike. (Good skatepark design, Rodrigues says, 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 pushes 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 manoeuvres one can perform at the park. And with a mop of dark curly hair, Santiago, who wears large corduroy trousers and Italian loafers, looks like a surfer in church clothes, which is to say he looks very good.

“It gets a lot of kids away from trouble,” he says of skateparks 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.”

Skateparks do have the potential to serve as tools for neighbourhood redevelopment. The area under the Burnside Bridge, in Portland, Oregon, was a hotbed of illegal activity before a group of skateboarders, in the early 1990s, began constructing concrete ramps at the site, eventually earning the blessing of the city.

Today, the skatepark, known as Burnside, is at the centre 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 says, “Skateparks and skateboarding bring creativity to an urban environment.”

Skating is no longer something to fear, thanks in part to Hawk, who popularised skate punk in the 1980s (Getty)

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

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 skatepark, produced through a community partnership with the nonprofit Make Skate Life; in Kabul, Afghanistan, a skatepark doubles as a space for young women to learn, thanks to Skateistan, a nongovernmental organisation; Shangilia, in Kenya, became the first skatepark in East Africa, with support from the nonprofit Skate Aid. And in South Korea, Borden says, young people responding to rigid expectations from adults have centred much of their lives on the skatepark. Sometimes they cook dinners there.

But what could it say about the times that skateparks 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 says. “There is an argument that skateboarding and skateparks are neoliberal training grounds.” Maybe!

© New York Times