How Skateboarders Won & Got A Skate Plaza At Philadelphia’s Muni Building — An Interview With Pat Heid

📷 Photos by Chris Mulhern, Zander Taketomo & Pat Heid

For some skaters, the sight of a sanctioned skate plaza at the Philadelphia Municipal Services building — one made out of Love Park, City Hall and old Muni materials — is surreal. For Pat Heid and his crew, it is a victory produced by years of advocacy, meetings, dead-ends, close-calls, and divine timing.

Philly’s new plaza opens on April 17, and here is the story of how it became a reality.

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Pat, can you introduce yourself?

My name’s Pat Heid. I am a skateboarder and live in Philadelphia. I’ve worked as a sales rep for Vans for the past decade. I’m also involved in a non-profit group here in Philly called SkatePhilly. I’ve helped get a few parks done in the past eight years or so. We renovated Whitehall Skatepark in the northeast, and built a small park in south Philly at Rizzo Rink, which includes some Love Park granite.

How did the opportunity to make a skate space at Muni come about?

It was through my interest in SkatePhilly. I was concerned with what was happening downtown, including the fate of the Love granite. Some of it had gone overseas, so I wanted to make sure there was stuff happening here in Philly that was supportive of the community downtown.

What’s the backstory to SkatePhilly?

It is about ten years old. It evolved from the group that was known as The Franklin’s Paine Skatepark Fund, which was the non-profit group that made Paine’s Park happen in 2013. Once that was complete, the group splintered a bit. There was a bit of a changing of the guard.

Next thing you know, it’s 2016, and Love Park is wrapping up. I’m a street skateboarder, and I owe so much to the downtown Philly scene. I had been working in the skate industry for a few years, and had interest in how to evolve the scene post-Love. Some advocacy for the Love materials was done by Heather Schaffer, Brannon John, and Jesse Rendell, who essentially got a lot of it put in storage. Shortly thereafter, Gustav Eden from Sweden reached out to the city, and ended up on the radar of what would eventually become SkatePhilly.

Hearing about [the interest from Sweden], I was like, “Cool, but what are you guys going to do downtown?”

I had been going to these meetings for years, trying to figure out how to do what Love Malmo ended up being, but in Philly: a slice of Love somewhere in the city. We went down all these dead-end roads for concept renderings, or proposals for half of a Love Park somewhere. Over the years, some of the people in the organization distanced themselves. Maybe I was interjecting too much about how to support the community.

📷 Photo by Zander Taketomo

So it was a lot of differing points after Paine’s had been built, Love ended, and what to do with that material?

Yeah, and things got done. We weren’t getting anywhere with the bigger ideas, so towards the tail end of COVID, Brian Panebianco, me, and our homies at 5th Pocket Skateparks came up with this simple, temporary plan. This park in south Philly under I-95 was a small project with a handful of ledges and a quarterpipe that got some of the Love granite out of the graveyard. That’s one of the most popular parks in Philly now. It was a huge little win, because there’s no space like that in south Philly. It was only about $25k and took two or three days to make. It was a good step to understand how these associations work, and how to pitch to Parks and Rec.

When did the Muni renovation come on your radar?

Some articles came out about the Municipal Services Building going under renovation prior to COVID. We knew it was next. City Hall was renovated 2011, Love got torn down in 2016, and Muni was left.

It was a matter of time…

One day, fences started going up around a really tiny section of it. In May of 2023, I was at a work meeting in L.A. and Jahmir Brown posted the fences with a caption that said: “It’s over and my heart is broken.”

Every week it was more fences, then a sign went up saying “Phase 1 Renovation.” These plazas were built in the early 60s, so it made sense, but we had no idea what the timeline is, what was happening with the game pieces or any of that.

Were they willing to share any of that information?

I woke up one day just thinking” “I need to at least try to save some of the materials or interject into this process.” I decided to try and find the project manager, and hope they were receptive. I started going down there a lot more. I remember seeing a group of people in suits, with one holding a drawing. I told them I was involved with this non-profit and was interested in salvaging some of the materials.

This woman who I approached was super cool. She broke down what was happening. She said she’d connect me with the Department of Arts and Culture, which was in charge of the upkeep on the game pieces. They counted as public art. It was installed in the 90s.

Did she have any idea of the history of skateboarding there?

She had an idea of it, and said her brother grew up skating with Josh Stewart in Florida, but once things like this get up the ladder, nobody quite gets it. There’s skaters who don’t even get it.

I reached out to her, she sent it up the chain, and long story short, the department denied the request to salvage any of the game pieces or the dominoes. They placed the blame on the skaters for all the upkeep that the art required, and said the artists themselves would have to sign off on them being donated to an organization. I kind of went behind her back, tracked down some of the artists, and a week later I’m on a Zoom call with them — they’re all in their 60s, mainly living in California — and they had no idea how iconic the space was because of their art. But it eventually went nowhere.

But still, that’s awesome they were hyped.

They wished us luck, wrote the letter, but nothing came of it. It’s funny, because now the game pieces are just sitting in a storage lot by the airport. They said they were going to destroy them.

How did you end up breaking through?

There are eight 14-and-a-half-foot long benches at Muni. That was the next thing we tried to save. I reached back out to the project manager asking if there’s any chance we could pick them up, saying they’re just as iconic as the game pieces.

Six of the benches got stacked outside of the plaza. I hit her back two more times, and it started getting down to the wire. Third time I hit her back saying my friend’s [Rich Van Horn] dad had a trucking company, which helped us move the Love granite back in the day, and we can cover the cost of transport. She hit me back saying she had approval, but it had to be the following Monday.

Luckily, Van Horn Trucking cleared their schedule, showed up with the truck, and we got all six benches loaded onto the flatbed in an hour-and-a-half. The project manager met us, and happened to mention that the redesign portion of the plaza hadn’t happened yet. The design of it was still up for interpretation. She told me there was a public meeting soon, and that she’d tip me off on when to go.

📷 Photo by Pat Heid

When was this?

We picked up the benches on June 23, 2023, but I never heard back about the meeting. Then, my homie Omar Alverio, who is a O.G. Philly head, hit me a few weeks later saying there’s a meeting in two days, and it was apparently the last chance we had of getting involved with the Muni project. They were finalizing the design concept. They had published it. Omar sent me the link from his homie who worked for the city.

“Oh shit, here we go…”

There was a little word bubble on the page with things they were looking for in the redesign. The building is all city workers, and they wanted to design a space for them. The word “skate” was in the bubble, but it was the only mention of it in this massive deck. It was alarming, but not surprising.

At the meeting, the project manager and the architects presented the design to the Philadelphia Art Commission, and they decide whether to approve it. After the presentation, they open it up to the public. Five or six other people — who I didn’t even know — said a bunch of stuff like, “It’s crazy you guys ignored the skate community.”

Wow.

I was the last one and had this prepared statement. And the Art Commission realized they weren’t speaking to the community with their design. They approved it, but they had to go back and speak to the skate community, and show they had a solution before the next round of approvals.

I messaged the project manager, and “apologized” for the way I interjected, but I had to say something. She understood: “No, no, you were professional, I’ll talk to some people.” She hit me back a week later to set up a meeting, asking me to prepare an argument.

Not a design proposal?

No, just like, “What are you asking for?”

It was going to be a City Hall meeting with the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Public Property, a few other officials, and the landscape architects. I invited Brian Panebianco and Tracy Gorman to join me – those dudes spent the most time downtown over the past few decades. Jesse Rendell also helped represent SkatePhilly.

I put together a 24-page presentation that included the history of skating in the plazas downtown, their global reach, and how they have impacted different generations — from the early 90s to the golden era of Love, the X-Games, then the skating ban downtown, to the more recent Muni generation. They had no idea about any of it. They didn’t remember DC Shoes offering a million dollars for upkeep of Love Park — “Really? It’s crazy we didn’t accept that.” There was even this Red Bull doc that I put in there, and the first portion is at Muni where they interview Jahmir. The things he was saying really resonated with these people, also because it was a Red Bull thing with a lot of views.

Then it was what we were asking for. We just asked for a small portion of the plaza to utilize some salvaged materials. I showed them all the Love granite we had saved, and the six benches we saved a month earlier.

And they see how empty City Hall and Love are, right?

I had to explain to them that even if they’re designing the space for the people in the building, they are only there Monday through Friday, nine to five. What’s going to happen in that space in the evenings and on weekends? It’s not a neighborhood space surrounded by residences. We could activate the space after hours, and keep it safer and not desolate for the general public, without the city having to spend a bunch of money.

We included a lot of examples of places like Southbank or Born Plaza in Barcelona or République in Paris to show how this has worked globally. Even at Cecil B. Moore Plaza at Temple University, they’ve started to embrace skateboarding as a big part of their campus culture. Then the last slide was the Love Malmo project, which hadn’t been completed yet: “Look, there’s a city in Sweden that’s rebuilding a part of our city.”

How did they react to all of that?

They were blown away. They needed to hear it because they didn’t understand it. Coincidentally, that week the Thrasher with the “Last Days of Muni” article came out, and I brought six copies to the meeting with sticky notes inside for where the article is.

The deputy commissioner told us she was in support of skaters at Love, but that was 20 years ago. It was a whole new regime now.

How long did it take them to get back to you?

Six weeks later. The Deputy Commissioner told me she went to the people in the building, and everything we said checked out. People felt safer with us skating there. They were struggling with how to activate the size of the space. And they want to move forward with our idea.

Wow.

Yeah, we were just asking for a slice — a ledge or something.

She draws this big rectangle in the middle of the plaza on the Zoom call, and says, “This is what we’re thinking.” A few months later, the project was officially approved by the Art Commission.

Then the budget ended up getting cut in half, and they were tripping on what we could actually build. They told us, “We know granite ground is one of the things you called out in your initial presentation, but we’re thinking brushed concrete ground within this space, with four of the benches from the original plaza.”

I had to be like, “I’m sorry, but the ground cannot be concrete. Is there any way we can have granite ground, go through an estimate process, and fund it through a partnership with SkatePhilly?” The ground was the whole essence of the space if we wanted to give it an authentic plaza vibe.

It ended up being a very large amount of money in their initial estimate. We got it down to a more attainable amount, but now we had to come up with an amount of money that SkatePhilly definitely did not have in the bank.

I reached out to a few partners, and luckily, Vans was down to support the project, similarly to how they supported the Brooklyn Banks. That was a long process, but the city ultimately agreed to partner with us and Vans on the granite ground. From there, we worked with the Landscape Architects to finalize and enhance the design.

That’s insane. Is there anything else different about it?

Well the space is a decent size, but comparatively to the old plaza, it’s small. And unfortunately due to budget and other design reasons, the tiles could not be “floating.” So there’s a minimal slope, which is one-and-a-half degrees for water run-off, left to right.

There are four of the original Muni benches. We were able to introduce a central element to the design too, which is a domino like there was at Muni before, but made with granite from Love. And we have an original City Hall bench mixed in as well, thanks to Heather Schaffer. The designers even added a brand new 35’ long dark granite ledge on the west side of the plaza.

Brian Panebianco and I worked hand-in-hand to make sure everything was spec’d appropriately, from the granite materials for the ground, to the heights and spacing of all the benches. The details down to the eighth of an inch are super important. We weren’t working with skatepark designers, so we kind of had to micro-manage the contractors when the benches were being installed.

📷 Photos by Pat Heid

It’s not a huge space, but it incorporates all three spots, and it is more than we could’ve ever asked for. We’ve got a chill spot with good ledges on granite ground, downtown next to City Hall. And we don’t need to worry about bike cops. Hopefully, everyone can take care of it and it lasts a long time.

It opens Friday, April 17.