Month: October 2011

“Skipping occupy Wall St. and looking to start an occupy that new park by Seaport movement.” — Roctakon

By now, the period for high hopes is long gone, and there appears to be no chance of the lies you were told throughout the summer becoming truths. Taji’s mom didn’t design it, Rob Campbell didn’t build it, California Skateparks didn’t pour the concrete, and Mayor Bloomberg isn’t going to let you skate it after he does a 9/11 ceremony there, considering there was no 9/11 ceremony here to begin with. There’s going to be a restaurant on the north side, and a dog park on the south, so the new security guard favorite, “We’ll talk to the park and see if they can open an area designated for skateboarding” isn’t going to come true either. (Evidently, security guards are the ones who dictate the allocation of public space.)

Though Occupy Wall Street’s objective(s) may be all over the place, its “99% against the greedy 1%” mantra aptly falls under the “allergic to stupid shit” umbrella. Whether they aim to combat stupid shit with more stupid shit remains to be seen. This skateboarding site does not care to dwell on the movement’s convoluted political goals, but it does applaud them for sitting in at a skate spot for multiple weeks and trying to make a point, as their headquarters are at Zuccotti Park, or what skateboarders simply call “World Trade Center.”

With Seaport, our goals have more to do with the structure of the spot, and the greed of the dog walkers and lunchtime office workers taking a much larger piece of the pie than they deserve. Preventing skateboarding in a place designed for it falls in line with “allergic to stupid shit” principles, and we will need to adjust our percentages to reflect lunch-hour crowds and dog walkers v.s. skateboarders to qualify the inequities plaguing this spot. A Wall Street Journal columnist described Occupy Wall Street as “a Tea Party with brains.” Occupy Seaport will be an angry-kid-throwing-a-tantrum-cursing-at-security-and-refusing-to-leave with brains.

There are two security guards here, and an entire downtown police force busy with protesters. It’s time we take back the Seaport, and see this movement spread to other spots, and eventually, other cities. Occupation is set to begin after Roctakon’s birthday party on Friday.

See you on Saturday.

P.S. Do you think those fully lit volleyball courts in Tribeca are still PACKED now that the weather in New York is consistently below sixty degrees?

P.P.S. If not the Seaport, this plaza in Cologne, Germany is basically what we need…not parks full of ramps up to ledges and a fifteen-skater capacity. Ledges, banks, flat, that’s it. But then again, the Germans were always ahead of the game with engineering.