Spots: Downtown Manhattan — Chinatown, East Village & L.E.S.
Spot: Every locale has its corners drenched in infamy. Whether it be on a grand scale of how the Bowery sat in the American consciousness as the ultimate image of New York’s decadence, low life underworld, and danger for the latter half of the twentieth century, or on a smaller one, bearing only a tiny smidgen of cultural significance, a la the Banks or Embarcadero being understood as central spheres of “locals only” attitudes reinforced by board jackings and beatdowns to skateboarders throughout the mid-90s.
Tompkins Square Park applies to both categories. Formerly a notorious squatter, homeless, punk-before-it-went-trust-fund, and overall degenerate hangout throughout the seventies and eighties, which had its rise in infamy culminate with the Tompkins Square riots of August 1988 (from the era where the entire neighborhood was known as “Little Vietnam” due to the makeshift shacks built by junkies and runaways that became a staple of the park’s renegade architecture, and not at all related to the area’s demographics), it began to lose its rusty, diseased edge in the 1990s. You know, with that whole Giuliani and “Quality of Life” thing that liberals love to complain about.
Obviously, a lot has changed. The white people who love Wes Anderson won, even though they present a facade that implies otherwise. In the 1970s, the area was the closest northeastern equivalent of The Haight in the late-60s, but not nearly as gay. And in the tradition of a lovely fact that modern day History Channel and VH1 documentaries love to point out, a lot of them got murdered due to the xenophobia of the neighborhood’s longtime residents, which believed they would inevitably be kicked out of their homes in favor of the new, more melanin-lacking, pot-and-”culture”-loving dirtbag residents searching for cheap rent (at the cost of an increased chance of being murdered by a brick to the head). Nowadays these post-post-hippies roam the streets, yoga mat under the arm, without any fear of a crackhead with 6 remaining teeth lurching in the shadows, salivating at the thought of using a syringe to swipe $4 and an iPod off of someone. And a (shitty) two bedroom apartment runs about $2,000 a month.
Oh, you can also skate there too. Better yet, you can practice. Or “train.”
Tompkins slowly began to ooze its way into the lifeblood of New York skateboarding early on in the 2000s. Several factors led to the need for a new place to “practice.” In late-summer 2001, the city’s prime stay-all-day ledge spot, Newport (wooden blocks with metal lips on the East River waterfront from nearly every 1998-2001 east coast video), underwent renovations that rendered the park depleted of skateable obstacles. The Little Banks gradually began to regain usage by the police department as a municipal parking lot in the summer following up to 9/11 and unfortunately, Ryan Hickey and co. were not around to slash any tires to discourage them. And as you probably may have noticed throughout this barrage of spot write-ups that tend to take a historical angle, 9/11 itself changed a lot of things. For a city where ninety-percent of the spots are affixed to some sort of office or residential building that is more than likely over fifty stories tall, it does not take a wild imagination to fathom why insanely heightened security, including military guards with machine guns standing 25-feet away from your favorite marble ledge, would rain on your nightly parade through Midtown.
And thus, the invariable solution for somewhere to spend all day and night, through grueling four-hour-long sessions, spliced apart with three-minute breaks to catch your breath, came to light. Right? “The Training Facility,” or simply, “The TF” was born.
It all began with Kerel Roach, “TF Eric,” and a yellow flatbar. Then a small box. Then a big box. Then another flatbar. Then, Victor Timofeev (a certifiable TF legend) broke the yellow flatbar. Then a launch ramp. Then, another yellow flatbar. Then came the best TF box of all, Scotty Schwartz’s magnum opus of 2003, the double-sided, World Industries flat-bar composed box. Then came the “organized” games of S.K.A.T.E. accompanied by drunken antics. Then came the hood kids from Avenue D. Then the fights. The robberies. The broken jaws. The 14-year-olds smoking Black & Milds. The paralegals playing baseball there and ruining the fun. The 86ings. The few boxes and rails that remain today.
If the more well-hidden needles of today are overrun by olden day notions and examples of riots, homelessness and poverty, still allowing Tompkins to sit as a leading symbol of low lives in New York’s collective history, then the park sits as skateboarding’s greatest example of mislabeling and irony.
Tompkins is without question, the most unproductive location in the history of skateboarding. Sure, maybe you learned one or two tricks there, but since when does that render the space a “training facility?” Time was better spent sitting three-on-a-bench that was really meant for two, profiling and sipping on 99-cent Arizonas while your life wasted away. It is here where anyone’s gear, trick selection, style, set-up, group of friends, griptape job, haircut, taste in music, mobbed kickflips, and any other possible nuance that only closet-homosexual skateboarders could ever think to bring up for discussion, would come into question and fall under the scrutiny of a bunch of geeks with shoelace belts who overcompensate for their own lack of self esteem by having “a sick kickflip back tail.”
As you probably figured out, very little “training” occurs in the Training Facility. Training of the intellect, perhaps. But in the most pathetic way imaginable as people scurry around for new ways to proclaim someone being “the worst dude ever.” When TFers are not trying to be the Pauline Kael of skateboarding, there are plenty of attractions for them to indulge in. Whether it be the daily fights that occur throughout the summers, to the newbies getting frustrated in their poorly toned abilities in the fine art of snaking (leading them to pout around about “New Yorkers being assholes”), the Dominicans selling “Italian” ices, to the occasional individual who is just stupid enough to actually skate at the TF as a skate spot, who may potentially be interesting enough to watch for a five minute interval before it is time to realize how wack his gear looks and how stiff his shoulders are when he does flip tricks.
Everyone has a TF story. Or nine. Hopefully one day, I will receive the financial backing to compile a four volume set of everyone’s TF stories. A TF Mayor A.K.A. TF Eric chapter. A Rob Campbell chapter. A Victor Timofeev chapter. A Kerel Roach chapter. TF Bradley, The Irish Potato, Scotty Schwartz, Puerto Rican Will, Puerto Rican Jason, Ellie, Danny Weiss before he became a fuckin’ fag, Billy Rohan, the paralegals, the World Industries Box, the plexiglass box, the manual pad, the black rail, the yellow rail, the second yellow rail, ABC Skateshop, the first eS game of Skate, Jake Lewis, Little Matt, Burton Smith, and countless others would be expounded upon. It would be a 78 chapter tour de force. I can’t even be modest about it. A New York Times Best Seller in the making.
The location itself is an enigma. It has a draw to it. You cannot escape its hold no matter how strong your reluctance to go there may appear to be. In fact, it was not until around 5:30 P.M. on August 14th, 2003 when we all realized that we were in the midst of the Northeast Blackout of 2003, when power had gone out at around 4:15 P.M. No, we did not care. We were skating a trash can off a launch ramp, not in the least bit concerned with the largest blackout in United States history. Like Billy Rohan said on that historic day, “The TF is the safest place in the world right now.” A homeless guy once came up to me at 2 A.M. while I was skating the Museum of Natural History and told me that his skateboard saved his life during the 1977 blackout. Well, my skateboard did not do shit. The TF did all the work. Although Bloomberg would never admit it, the TF’s existence is why the city did not experience widespread looting like it had during its last major blackout in 1977. Unless you count Brownsville. But there’s no TF there.
As far as terrain goes, there’s usually a box and a flatrail that you can bring from Autumn, located on 9th Street between Avenue A and First Avenue, a mere half a block away. There is also flat. And some cracks in the pavement to do tricks over. If you want to risk having the needles and broken beer bottles spill out, maybe you will be daring enough to set a trash can on its side to do ollies or trendy nosebonks over.
While the hues that give Tompkins its unique character have become a bit more faint, they still remain if you look close enough. The best place to start would be the park’s public bathroom, which is an ecological disaster zone. Even beyond that, it is a cramped cube of immoral behavior. Recent accounts have relayed walking in and finding a naked, 250-pound black man shaving in the mirror with little concern for his bare-bottom and disfigured penis being exposed to any oncoming visitors unsuspecting of the fact that they would soon go blind from disgust. The Tompkins Square bathroom is truly a time machine back into the eighties. Complimentary rapings are included. As for the rest of the park, the needles are still there, so are the vials. You just need to look harder. And it is perhaps one of the few places left where you can show up to at 9:30 A.M. and find a bunch of 14-year-olds drinking 40s and disposing of blunt guts. A few hours later, you will see them tossing glass bottles over the twenty-five-foot high fence into Avenue A traffic because they are bored. The park is also responsible for a bunch of premature teen pregnancies, and is a stomping ground for overly promiscuous teenage girls looking to feel your griptape torn hands and cracked lips caressing their necks (NOTE: Quarter Snacks does not condone statutory rape.)
It is unfortunate that as I write this (in 2010), that the TF is no longer the overbearing force in New York skateboard politics that it once was. Like Tammany Hall, Tompkins’ quick resurgences pale in comparison to the power it once held throughout the early-to-mid portions of the 2000s. The city’s skateboarders have become increasingly soft, letting themselves be chased out of residency by Avenue D kids and paralegals playing baseball “with a permit” in the concrete corner that they once ruled with an iron first. No longer does it make or break entrances into the “New York scene,” as the floodgates have been opened, and the gate keepers that once stood
there with harsh criticism and stern looks have either moved upstate, quit skateboarding, found religion, or are currently at a local bar getting drunk at three in the afternoon. Now, all it takes is a back tail and a smile to gain your acceptance. Show up at 12th and A and be greeted with open arms. Give us your tired, huddled masses? No. We only seem to be accepting your deliberately ironic, cookie-cutter masses, without a hint of character or uniqueness to their entire gimmick.
And then you wonder why the city is not what it used to be. We can all reminisce on the good ol’ days, when being vibed out of a spot was not just a myth, or a practice done in San Francisco by kids who really wished they were from New York, but it seems as if those sweet, sweet fruits of nostalgia are decaying as quickly as the plys on your tail when you drive out to Long Island to skate Roslyn Banks. However, no matter how glistened and glamorized the surroundings get, our recollections remain, if just in the form of a few slight details that helped make our childhoods extraordinary. Memories of when Tompkins was the epicenter of it all, governed by four hunks of urethane crushing their way through crumpled dry leaves of the fall, to the melting snow of the winter, all the way through the urine left behind by the homeless taking up temporary residence in the park throughout the spring and summer. A time when bad attitudes, and trivial critiques reigned supreme, holding everyone up to a standard that simply no one could live up to. This, was a great time to be alive and on a skateboard in New York City.
Bust — ♦ / Rare: There may occasionally be paralegals playing baseball here during the weekdays in the summertime, otherwise, you can skate here whenever you want. If you show up before 1 P.M., you’ll typically have to lug over the box and rails from Autumn Skateshop a half block away on 9th Street.
Location: East 9th Street and Avenue A in the East Village. Take the 6 to Astor Place and skate east on Astor until it turns into Saint Marks Place. Skate east on Saint Marks until it ends on Avenue A. Make a right, and skate north for one block.
Pictures (Click to Enlarge):
