UPDATE: Already got word that May 24th is the official *ribbon cutting ceremony*, with the mayor, press, etc. The space is officially open to the public on May 25th.
Between a massive press release put out by the city and Jenkem’s piece with Steve R., we now have a clearish picture about how the Brooklyn Banks reopenings are set to go. (As opposed to a bunch of dumb rumors that surfaced when the city removed the bricks from the Big Banks back in 2020.)
The spot has been fenced off for bridge repairs since June of 2010. It was initially supposed to take a few years, and it wound up taking …yeah. And they’re still not done! Barring that brief period in 2017 when the Big Banks were unofficially a go, the spot has been in a coma for multiple generations of skaters at this point.
Phase 1 will be open to the public (and allow skateboarding) as of May 24th, when the mayor is supposed to do some commemoration there for the 140th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge. (UPDATE: May 24th is the ribbon cutting ceremony, May 25th is the official open to the public date.) This phase will include the area of the Banks 9 and basketball courts across the street. While it’s only a small portion of the original spot, the entire area has been de-weeded and cleaned up. It was probably the only part of the spot that didn’t get at least partially destroyed throughout the bridge repair years. The rail is still in tact, and the slappy curb is about to get an onslaught of catch-up tricks from the compounded evolution that slappy tricks experienced throughout the 2010s and early 2020s.
As per Jenkem, phase 2 will be rebuilding the Small Banks area, which is in a dire state of dilapidation, and the details of which are still being ironed out. Seeing as how the bridge’s off-ramp that served as a landing space for the bank-to-wall in the nineties has been decommissioned for traffic, there’s already rumors swirling that they may even make that a go by removing the fence that skateblocked the spot. A far down the road phase 3 would ultimately be a restoration and re-bricking of the Big Banks, but details on that are also sparse at the moment.
You can read the full press release here, or take a time machine back to the spot’s peak via Chromeball.
