Boarder wars

Part 4

by Yvonne Abraham

Which raises the issue of how to satisfy these competing interests. The city has proposed a skateboard park in East Boston, to be managed by the Boston Community Centers (BCC). Next year's capital budget earmarks $100,000 for the project, which will be located on a site the Harborside Community Center shares with the Yumana/ Barnes Middle School. It will be the city's first public skateboard park. (There is a private park, called Maximus, in Cambridge, but the entry fee is $10, and skaters complain it's too crowded, and too intimidating for younger kids, with as many as 50 skaters there at any one time.)

Right now the BCC is collecting planning ideas from other cities -- for instance, New York, where Riverside Skate Park was recently built on the edge of the residential Upper West Side. That park, now open a year, has a staff, provides training for skaters, and is "a phenomenal success," according to BCC deputy director Charles Clabaugh, who is heading the skateboard-park project.

Mike Bell, Harvey Bierman, and other skaters also want in on the planning process, before it's too late. But even though Liff and Clabaugh say they're happy to involve skaters in the park's development, Bierman says he heard nothing about the project until he went down to City Hall for the hearing. "I want to start a committee of skateboarders to help design that park," says Bell. "If the city spends $100,000 and it's bad, that's a big waste of money."

Liff has been also been tossing around another idea that might work: a kind of moveable summer skateboard park, where certain city streets would be closed off on particular days, with ramps and loops brought in for skaters to use -- something for the public to watch, "like a traveling circus." But that kind of thing could take a decade to pull off.

Of course, even if East Boston turns out to be a dream park, some skaters will still prefer Copley Square. "People go to Copley because of where it's located," Bell says. "It's not stuck out in the middle of nowhere. It's a social scene."

And there are logistical considerations. "It's got to be convenient," Bierman says. "We suggested other areas for parks -- the Fenway, the Esplanade, Roxbury -- but again, that won't stop people from skating in Copley and those areas. You'll always find kids who love to go into Boston and skate. It's a great day trip for them."

And so, kids will always get busted. But then again, the threat of getting busted is itself an important part of skateboard culture's cachet. Magazines like Thrasher are full of skaters' tales of getting caught. Ratings of skate spots take "bustability" into account. Despite the corporate embrace in which skateboarding is increasingly held, it is still on the fringe, still for renegades.

And indeed, that's just the quality that seems to intrigue corporate marketing departments. For a few years now, ESPN has been making buckets of money from its Extreme Games, which include skateboarding, garnering itself some serious cred in the process. Mainstream America is catching on as well. The latest J. Crew catalogue makes preppy seem Young 'n' Hip by putting models in too-big clothes on skateboards.

And Nike, which is set to completely swallow the skateboard shoe market in coming years, has gone at skaters head on, with a new advertising campaign championing their rights.

"What if we treated all athletes the way we treat skateboarders?" three different national TV advertisements ask. In the tennis ad, a cop busts a doubles games on a hard court. ("We're not from around here," two players plead, as they try to scramble away over a fence. "We got a coupla monkeys!" says the cop.) The golf and running spots play on the same theme, with innocent athletes getting busted for just doing their thing. In ads, at least, Nike unequivocally sides with the skateboarder against the fuddy-duddy establishment.

Skateboarders mostly agree that the Nike campaign will be good for their sport, raising public awareness of their woes. Mike Bell hopes it will lead to more skateboard parks. Harvey Bierman is a little more cynical. "ESPN and Mountain Dew and Nike are becoming promoters of the sport, and making it available to people. Stores like Blades didn't exist 10 years ago," he says. "Nike, especially, is talking a big game."

But Nike's talk has been confined largely to advertising; they're not going anywhere near Boston's political controversy.

"We don't take a stance," says Nike's outdoor-division spokesperson Vizhier Corpuz. "We respect both points of view. From the athlete's side, it's certainly an issue of freedom, and from the city's side, it's an issue of safety. Our campaign points out that these are in fact athletes, and that it's important to show a little bit of respect for the sport."

Nike's antiestablishment edge isn't quite so razor sharp in real life, though. "They don't seem to be standing behind their ads, in Boston," Bierman says. He and other skateboard advocates learned of the company's officially neutral stance when they contacted Niketown's manager. When they tried to contact corporate headquarters in Oregon, "We got the runaround."

Corpuz says Nike prefers to develop and refurbish skateboard parks rather than take sides. But it's still too early even for that. The company's only been in skateboard shoes for a little over two years.

Of course, for Nike, coming out against the ordinance would mean opposing the very Back Bay advocacy groups whose favor it had to curry to get Niketown built on Newbury Street, just steps away from Copley Square -- which places it in something of a pickle. A multimillion-dollar sporting-goods company can only get so close to the fringe, after all.

And if part of skateboarding's appeal is its outsider quality, there is only so much City Hall can do. Travis Perrys and Ricky Greenwoods will always be able to run from cops and skateboard somewhere else. "They try to catch us, but they can't," says Perry. "We've got wheels. They don't."

Back to part 3

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