Down Under That Mammoth Bridge Overpass
Our Town downtown
October 30, 2006
Noisy and foul? Smells like a skate park
Under the Manhattan Bridge, next to the Pathmark that is Manhattan’s largest grocery store, a skeleton is rising on the waterfront. It looks like it might be a boathouse. It’s not. The city is building a storage facility where it can stockpile salt in the winter to spread on snowy streets.
Necessary? Probably. Exciting? Not at all.
The concrete scraps of land under our majestic bridges have always served as the receptacles for the things that none of us wants in our backyard.
The Brooklyn Bridge overpass is so out-of-the-way that a cache of emergency supplies from the Cold War era was found only this year inside the bridge’s foundation. Where else in Manhattan could you store water drums, paper blankets and hundreds of thousands of crackers for decades without anyone’s noticing?
Currently, much of the area under the bridge is a fenced-off parking space for city vehicles. Where the bridge comes out of the ground, it still smells like piss and graffiti adorns every surface. That’s what makes it the only possible location for the city’s most storied and influential skate spot: the Brooklyn Banks.
The Banks, near the intersection of Pearl Street and Robert Wagner Place, is about thirty percent smaller than it was in its heyday, after the Parks Department renovated the area in 2004 and took some of the land for a park – the green kind, not the skate kind. But it still draws a daily crew from high-schoolers just hitting puberty to guys in their early twenties, who roll down to the Banks on skateboards, BMX bikes and roller blades.
When the park closed for renovations in 2004, “we just terrorized the city,” says Chino, a 22-year-old “street rider” and father of two. Street riders are BMX bikers whose bikes are specially equipped to ride rails, ledges and stairs – and have no brakes.
“You’ll know the spots we been in because all the ledges are black and chipped,” says Chino. The gashes in the side of the rectangular ledge at the Banks, which the street riders like to grind, make it easy to understand why street riders are considered nuisances and terminally shooed off the streets by the police.
Riding in a park designed for them may seem like less of a rush than riding the streets, but the street riders keep it interesting with breakneck stunts, like riding forwards up the sloped brick bank and then coming down full-speed backwards (no helmets), and by making their own changes to the terrain.
“Let’s go find wood,” says one street rider to the others, who then head north and disappear. I imagine it’s some sort of street lingo. No, Chino explains, they’re actually going to look for a flat piece of plywood they can lay over the stairs to complete their homemade ramp.
What they like best about the Banks has little to do with its setup. Says Scott, a 17-year-old street rider also known as “the one-inch Korean,” the best thing about the Banks is that “nobody kicks you out.”
That’s the beauty of down-under-the-overpass. Developers who will fight tooth and nail for waterfront property on this island have not thought of looking here. Yet.
“We get kicked out of everywhere,” shrugs Max, a 17-year-old skateboarder and student at Friends Seminary. Everywhere but here, the Manhattan Bridge Skatepark that opened last summer in the cavernous, deserted underbelly of the bridge. It’s even more deserted than the Banks. There’s no one around to kick them out, no one to make sure they don’t enter after dusk through a rolled-back section of fencing.
To find the park, follow the bridge through Chinatown past hundreds of food stalls, through cobblestone alleyways and past fenced-off lots full of litter until you hear the slap of skateboards. You’re there, where Market Street would meet Monroe Street if the grid existed here.
The thundering of passing trains can get “annoying,” says Max, as can the waterfall that pours down when trains go by on rainy days, but these annoyances are less major than those at other parks. Like the basketball players at Tompkins Square or the BMX bikers at the Banks.
On a nice day, a hundred kids do ollies over the flat-top pyramid, grind the rails, or sit and watch on the concrete steps that smell like piss, in front of a backdrop of water-stained rock face maybe 150 feet high criss-crossed by bare piping and topped by the bridge. It’s colossal and industrial and straight out of a movie, but the skaters are casual about it.
“Street spots are better,” says Max, because there’s “an endless amount of it.”
The park is called “one of the worst places on the planet” on a skateboarding website.
That’s why it’s theirs.
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