Tag: Thomas Greene Park

Why exactly skatepark designers, when put to task of maximizing on a space in New York City, have opted for throwing in everything throughout a park minus a regular ledge is anyone’s guess. Tribeca, Maloof, and Astoria barely have anything you could call a regular ledge, yet somehow, ledges would be on the top of the list if you ask someone what sort of spot they’d like to have more of in New York. Lenox is our best ledge spot, and five thousand people will come to the T.F. when there’s a new box. (But then again, many of us go to the T.F. for the culture, so the box is hardly an incentive.) By some miracle, McCarren got it right, and appropriately enough, the park is so awful that you could actually consider it to be a legitimate street spot.

The people at Open Road, California Skateparks, Friends of Douglass Greene Park, and the Tony Hawk Foundation were smart enough to figure out that the best thing for New York, a place where twenty people would line up to skate a concrete island into traffic in the back of Union Square, would be to put three ledge-like obstacles in a basketball court, as opposed to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a wedge ramp to a ledge with a Euro gap three feet after it. Now at Douglass Greene Park on 3rd Avenue and Degraw Street in Park Slope, they have a bench with one curved side and another straight side, a low manual pad, and an up-and-down sort of triangle ledge, all on familiar basketball court ground. Take the D, N or R to Union Street, skate north for two blocks, and make a left on Degraw.

Billy claims that the Parks Department still has all the original marble from Red Benches, BAM, etc. in storage. It’d definitely be a step in the right direction if they recycled it into a similar type of project instead of building six other skateparks that get crowded as soon as school gets out.

[Spotted via NY Skateboarding]

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