Since the early 2000s, skateboarding in New York has been forcefully pushed out of marble bench-lined public spaces and into fenced-in basketball courts — so much that we began to overtake the ballplayers themselves. As we’ve now been pushed into skateparks throughout this past decade, even the courts are becoming a novelty.
Vernon-Jackson has long been one of the best spots in the city that everyone would always forget about. Strained for ideas on where to go skate at 2 on a Wednesday and sensing the “ok fuck it let’s do nothing”-point of 4 P.M. closing in, there has seldom been a resistant voice to taking the twenty-minute train ride from downtown to skate an straight fucking ledge that you don’t get kicked of, one stop into Queens.
Vernon-Jackson isn’t gone, but those pink [straight fucking] ledges that are becoming an endangered species are, and the rub-bricked concrete ledge behind the basketball hoop is a big question mark. The iconic little kid spot — the frontside-for-regular metal bench over the ledge — remains and will slowly fade into obscurity as kids begin skating ten-stair handrails ten months into skateboarding. May we forever remember the pink ledges as being home to one of the most low impact moments of Chris Cole’s high impact career as a pre-gothic skateboarder.
On another note, the absolute worst spot to emerge from the 2000s court-ization of New York skateboarding and one of the worst ledges in city limits may potentially never see the light of 2017.
The Jackson Playground ledge was a surefire sign that your attempt at skateboarding in a given day was a complete failure. You didn’t even make it to Columbus Park. You opted to spend a precious 45 minutes of your time on earth with a concrete piece of shit. It’s bourgeois to say fuck this place because some kid in Iowa would probably sell his little brother into cruel child labor to have this thing, but fuck this place. Bye.