New York Magazine - USA (2019-09-16)

(Antfer) #1

14 new york | september 16–29, 2019


intelligencer


Tribes:


Asphalt Activism


The saving of a skate park in


Tompkins Square.


By Stella Bugbee


everybody in New York has at least one place in the
city that haunts them, but some parts of downtown seem
genuinely possessed. A stretch of asphalt in Tompkins
Square Park, known as the “Training Facility,” is flat and
full of cracks, and if you didn’t know better, you might
assume the community wanted some capital improve-
ments. But the neglect is part of the appeal for skaters
who just want a place to learn tricks. Competitions there
date back to 1989, and the spot was a backdrop in the
1995 movie Kids; its popularity grew after 9/11, when
security around the city’s public areas tightened. Now it
is beloved by a new generation of rising skate stars, and
pros like Alexis Sablone credit it with being one of the
best places for female skaters to feel comfortable enough
to try the sport.
Last month, while reading a community newsletter,
Fanny Cohen, a student and friend to many of the skate-
boarders in the area, learned about a plan to replace TF
with synthetic turf. The city intended to turn it into a
place for kids to play sports while the nearby East River
Park is ripped up (as part of a plan to protect the city
from flooding). A 22-year-old artist and local skater
named Adam Zhu, who grew up on 12th Street, started
the hashtag #savetompkins on Instagram as well as a
petition to protest the plan, which quickly attracted
32,000 signatures. The post got the skaters a meeting
with officials in the basement of Tompkins Square
Library, where they pleaded with the Parks Department
to look elsewhere. “The stories about growing up here,
learning how to skate, what it meant to them, what this
neighborhood was like at that time, were very moving,”
Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver later told me. “The
petition was one of the largest I’ve seen in a while.”
Zhu organized a rally for the first Saturday in Septem-
ber with the support of City Councilwoman Carlina
Rivera. But on Friday, the city decided to change course,
and what had been planned as a protest became a party
instead. “This is a place where you can come any day of
the week to skateboard, but it’s also for people who feel
like a misfit,” Rivera said in the park, as dozens of skaters
streamed into the fenced-off lot on their boards—a trium-
phant, sweaty crowd of all ages, genders, and races, eager
to talk and happy to be around one another. Someone
brought a watermelon to share. When I asked Zhu, who
works at Supreme, if he’d been bitten by the activist bug,
he laughed. “A lot of people have told me, like sort of jok-
ingly, that I should run for mayor.” ■

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