For those of us who didn't grow up with an urban plaza like Love Park, EMB, or the one designed by Rob Dyrdek, this is what a plaza looked like. Depending upon the size of your town, there were usually a couple of strips of asphalt and concrete that maybe offered a few things to skate. If suburban sprawl set in, your town was blessed/cursed with a whole bunch of these things. At the least there was a lot of flatground. Maybe it wasn't always the smoothest flatground, but there was a lot of it.
The plaza has been somewhat unchanged over the years in terms of general layout. I'm guessing that it was skated in the 1980s, but the peek usage was in the early to mid 1990s. Kids probably still skate there today, but there isn't much left and there are always cops around. It has seen the coming and going of many businesses over the years. There was a donut shop and a Fotomat. Both have long since been demolished. The donut place has been replaced with a drug store that does have a couple of manual pads. The film processing kiosk is now parking spaces.
We would skateboard here after 9:00 PM when all the stores had closed. It was relatively hassle free. There used to be a couple of wooden benches that could be moved. My recollection is that the only time the cops said anything was if the benches were moved away from the storefronts. There was a little flat gap on the right side of Big Lots, formerly Sidey's, where a couple of shrubs used to be. I remember a lot of time spent trying flip tricks in the parking lot during the early 90s. It was not the greatest blacktop at the time.
Honestly, the plaza was lacking for excitement. I don't think I hated the place, but I wasn't thrilled with it either. It was more of a neutral default spot. The benches were mediocre at best, although they did slide OK for board and nose slides. There weren't any curbs, sidewalks, loading docks, or stairs like some of the better plazas I've skated over the years. I feel we gave up on going here because it was dull.
5 comments:
those concrete blocks that form the bases for the light poles are perfect to learn wallies on.
What about parking garages? With New York winters, aren't there some of those around? Speaking of which, what do you do in the winter? Freeze? Hibernate? Are there indoor spots?
Wallies would have been a better thing to learn instead of doing switch varial kickflips. Oops. In fairness, I did have that trick on lock back then. I think I had regular and fakie versions, too. Oh, the poor choice of our youth.
My town is small enough there are no parking garages.
As for winter, it changes. It used to be hibernate, but since global warming came about, we don't get much in the way of winter any more. That's not to say it won't snow, but you can sort of count on good weather up till January. Then it will be off and on snow mixed with warmer dry spells until spring. I probably just jinxed it by typing that out.
There are a couple of indoor parks. There's always been one or two over the years. I have to go check out the Jamestown park soon because they built new stuff, but I haven't had the time to get over there.
As long as it is dry, I'll bundle up and skate in the cold. If the sun is out and the wind is calm, it's usually not that bad.
switch varial flips on lock, nothing to look back askance at really, to paraphrase Abe Simpson "varials were the style at the time".
I've so thought about using an Abe Simpson quote or two from time to time. I'll have to work one in someday soon.
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