As the ’80s progressed, Rodriguez watched the ranks slowly grow. Then one day he followed the rush of skaters down Sixth Avenue to Bowery, onto Broadway, past Park Row and City Hall, bombing the hill, finally veering right, into Brooklyn Banks.
There, slightly inclined and cased in fine brick, was a block-long basin with a short, steep bank along the left side. Skaters were everywhere: planting, dropping, powersliding, and riding the walls. At the bottom of the park (a.k.a. Big Banks), skaters rolled up the brick transition onto the Bridge’s vertical pillars. At the top of the park (a.k.a. Small Banks), skaters rolled up a short brick hill leaping onto and over the embankment wall, into the off-ramp’s traffic.
There was also trash, crack, crackheads, no restrooms, and a homeless encampment inside of the towering anchorages that made the park look like a cathedral. Hundreds gathered there, and every weekend the city’s tiny sects assembled into one vivid army, united by the thing that made them not belong.
This was mostly unintentional: The Bridge itself opened in 1883, and the space sat for nearly a century before an architect named M. Paul Friedberg covered the long bank in brick, eventually adding benches, chess tables, and a sunken basketball court (where Mike Vallely filmed an early video part). Red Brick Park opened in 1979. “It was not with the intention of creating a recreational area,” Friedberg said in Deathbowl to Downtown, a good NYC skate documentary. “It’s interesting it became that.”
Regardless, the city had created an inadvertent haven: a magnet that kept skaters in one place, away from sidewalks, office parks, security guards, and everyone else. And for a decade, everyone was happy. Rodriguez was there “every day,” watching ranks grow as the Banks supplanted Washington Square Park as the skateboarding epicenter of NYC, the East Coast, and possibly the whole world.
Then, in November 2004, he rolled down Broadway, picking up speed past City Hall, and then saw a fence. With no notice, the city had closed the Banks for construction on the bridge overhead.
So began Rodriguez’s work as a liaison between the skaters, the city, the planners, the builders, the DOT, the Parks Department, and all the rest. Over the next 15 years the Banks would reopen, close again, rebuild somewhat, and serve as a storage lot. (This is when Carozza and Becker first skated there, crawling in through holes in the fence.)
The city kept Rodriguez in the loop, and eventually asked if he’d design another park, this one under the Manhattan Bridge. LES opened in 2012, and was designed for the kind of skating that flared in the 1990s: ollie-based, with flip/spin tricks onto and off of rails, ledges, platforms, and caped transitions. Visit today and you’ll see trash, homeless people, run-over rats, maybe street-tech genius Mark Suciu, or even Weckingball—the sport’s new purist, avenging angel, and resident fact-checker.
LES changed things. NYC’s skate epicenter shifted to a new place five minutes away, literally made to skate. As a result, interest in skating the Banks waned, though interest in protecting it did not. Becker and Carozza’s petition still grows, and while the DOT has not issued a public statement, one employee anonymously told me that the bricks will be replaced.
For his part, Rodriguez hasn’t wavered.
“After dealing with this so many times, so many ways, my reaction isn’t negative—it’s positive,” he said. “It was hard to see the Brooklyn Banks with no bricks on the flats. But I could see from a DOT perspective, there’s less people using the roads because of quarantine, so maybe they’re trying to get everything done. Yes, they removed the bricks. To do the work. But I’m positive they’ll put ’em back. And it’ll be better than ever.”
Cole Louison lives and skates in New York.