Community Featured Articles Sports

Skateboarders demanded a space of their own

By Tarak Jayachandran

It’s 5 p.m on a Friday in July in the East Village. The sky is overcast. The National Weather Service has registered the day’s high at 96 degrees, 10 degrees above the norm for this time of year in New York City. 

The skaters pile in, mainly guys, but also one girl. They dap each other up, one fist bumping another.  Some bump to whatever is streaming through their earbuds. 

A line of skaters starts to form in the middle of the park. Some skaters take off their baggy t-shirts. Each waits their turn for that first push on their board, the one that builds momentum, that sets up the trick. Their skateboards slam against the stretch of asphalt, obscured by a row of Elm trees at the intersection of Avenue A and East 10th Street.

The lone woman, Jeanette Edelman, a graphic designer from the Lower East Side hasn’t been rolling on her own board for too long. But skating at Tompkins is a “form of getting all my anxiety out, my emotions out, and it’s really nice to come here and just do your thing, nobody really judges you,” she said. Most of what she’s gleaned skating-wise has come from being around and watching others at the park. 

In 2020, skateboarding became an Olympic sport and was introduced at the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. A 2021 survey by Action Watch found that sales of skateboarding equipment spiked 118% between June 2019 and June 2020. 

In 2019, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation lost its bid to replace the asphalt at Tompkins Square Skate Park with an astroturf for youth softball and baseball players. Department officials believed kids would have been better than  skateboarders. They said skateboarding was something to do on the sidewalk and in the streets. 

What changed their minds was a petition with more than 33,000 signatures from local skaters, owners of skate shops, including Labor and Supreme, and others who wanted to keep the park the way it was. 

Tompkins Skate Park “represents a unique breeding ground where a lot of different types of people meet each other, connect with each other and do more positive things,” said Fionn Leonard, a fashion model who’s appeared in Paper and Icon magazines among others.