Rone’s Wild Ride
NEW PARKS
Throughout the city, parks officials are starting to get the message. In Astoria, the Bronx and Coney Island, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation has hired contractors to build and operate new skate parks. New York City’s first indoor skate park is set to open on Staten Island by summer 2009.
Creating a skate park is much like designing a recreational playground, but instead of monkey bars and swings, skate parks need ramps, rails, and lots of insurance. Staten Island’s parks chief believes the long term advantages of skate parks make the investment worth it. “Its become a real asset in terms of people who are engaged in the activity,” says Paulo. “The alternative is not having the kids have a place to do this or using an area that’s not appropriate from our point of view, so we were able to make it a win-win situation.”
The term “skate parks” doesn’t begin to describe to the frenzy of activity in a confined space. The usuals who frequent the park are not only of varying races and cultural backgrounds but have different abilities usually marked by their age. The young kids are considered amateurs, the preteens intermediates, the 18-to-24 year olds authorities and the over-30 guy the neighborhood connoisseur. These grown men, some well into their thirties, often come alone and don’t interact much with the younger kids. Every once in a while, a female, usually on inline skates or a skateboard, will take charge in the bowl and then scurry off to let the boys take over.
Different skate parks manage all that action in different ways. Some operate under schedules—smaller kids ride in the day and older kids at night. Others carve up the turf by section, so BMX riders practice on one ramp and skaters on another.
But New York City’s parks tend not to have special times or spaces for BMX, and that cramps experienced freestyle riders, who need ample room to land hard tricks. Millennium Skate Park consists of two bowls interconnected into one huge pool. This layout makes it difficult for more than one person at a time to skate or ride in a bowl.
Each skater and BMX rider waits silently until it’s their turn to sail down a slope, grind along a lip, or defy gravity by jumping up in the air. Skilled maneuvers like Tyrone’s will draw shouts. The park is always drenched in noise—the older kids cursing because they failed to land a trick, or a group of teenage boys bragging about the latest pair of Dunks they got. But more than anything, the sounds you’ll hear are the spinning of the wheels on the concrete surface, the grinding of wooden boards or BMX pegs and the crack, smack sound of a board that gave way under its riders feet and is bouncing across the park.
