Boarder wars

Part 2

by Yvonne Abraham

"Travis, we out," says Greenwood, walking calmly away from the police car. Both skaters head for a side street.

"Hey," yells the cop, from behind the wheel. "Hey!" This is not the kind of "hey" one walks away from. Greenwood and Perry skulk back over and lean into the passenger-side window. The police officer lectures them. It's illegal to skate here, he tells them, tracing the boundaries of the square with an outstretched arm. Would they show him their skateboards? How much did they cost? $100? $150? Why would they risk having them confiscated? Perhaps unwilling to go further with a photographer around, the cop gives the kids a warning and sends them on their way.

"See, you gotta know how to sweet-talk them to stop them from taking your board away," says Greenwood. "But what was he gonna do, chase me? Fat ass! Have another doughnut!"

Perry and Greenwood are the kind of kids Back Bay groups like the Friends of Copley Square, the Back Bay Association, and the Newbury Street League were thinking of when they lobbied to have the no-skate law extended last week. The ordinance is sponsored by City Councilor Tom Keane, an avid inline skater himself (he uses the road). Neighborhood associations, which have a strong influence in Keane's District 8, believe the skateboards damage the quality of life -- and business -- in the tony shopping district.

The two multipierced, baggy-shorted 16-year-olds travel from Claremont, New Hampshire, to skate in Boston because the cops are even stricter back home, where there are signs everywhere prohibiting skating. Here, where nobody knows their names or their parents, they can afford a bit of bravado.

"People move," Perry says. "They get run over if they don't." But the bravado soon gives way to a sense of injustice. "Look at these guys," says Greenwood, lighting a cigarette, and pointing to a group of kids on inline skates. "They're not trying to outlaw them, are they? We just want to ride our skateboards. It's not a crime."

But those who support the ordinance say what skateboarders are doing to certain parts of this city is a crime. They consider them a threat to both public safety and valuable property.

"If you've got a skateboard that you're doing acrobatics with and you're abutting an incredibly crowded area," says Carol Thompson, the Area D police attorney who drafted the bill, "Even if somebody doesn't get hurt, they might get intimidated, and they won't use that area."

Although the Boston Police Department hasn't received any formal complaints about collisions with skaters or their boards, many of the ordinance's advocates, acting on perceived threats to public safety, attest to feeling intimidated themselves. They all cite the example of the pregnant John Hancock employee who was knocked down by a skateboarder. Most of the evidence for skateboarders' threat to public safety is anecdotal.

Damage to property has been easier to pin down. "We've had a proliferation of skateboarders in the Back Bay area," says Marianne Abrams, executive director of the Back Bay Association, which represents area businesses. "They have been very destructive. They jump or slide off structures and ruin hard surfaces like brownstone and granite." They've also used the edges of private flower beds as launching pads, only to destroy the gardens when they wipe out. "If you're going to do a sport," Abrams says, "don't do it on somebody else's property."

Abrams says some property owners have gone as far as changing their planters to make skating on them impossible. Much of the damage done to historic buildings has no remedy, however. McKim, Mead & White's Boston Public Library, the object of a painstaking, recently completed multimillion-dollar restoration, and H.H. Richardson's Trinity Church, are architectural treasures this town has been pretty possessive about since they opened late last century. If skateboards damage 100-year-old masonry, there's no fixing the problem with some grout and a lick of paint.

John Clift, director of facilities at Trinity Church, says skateboards have chipped away the stone on the front steps of the cathedral and taken chunks out of the stairs of the back parish house. Neither is replaceable. Clift has taken to putting sand on the steps, making it impossible to roll along them. Church officials try to explain to skaters the damage they can do. Some leave, some don't. Because the church closes at 6 p.m., nighttime skaters grind with impunity.

Apart from safety and property-damage issues, there's simply something intimidating about skateboarders per se. They look different, for starters, many of them pierced and baseball-capped, wearing impossibly baggy trousers and big shirts. And they often hang around in groups. All of which prompts a kind of generational reflex reaction, to intensify whatever other concerns adults have. "They don't know how to behave," Abrams says.

Forward to part 3 - Back to part 1

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.