By Will Glovinksy
*In the hotbed microcosm that is Washington Square Park, it is rare that something changes with little fanfare. But that is what appears to have happened with skateboarders in the park.
“There has been a significant decrease in skateboarder activity,” Gil Horowitz, leader of the Coalition for a Better Washington Square Park, declared.
Horowitz, who can see the park from his apartment windows, wants to protect both the new granite benches — appealing targets for trick skaters — and senior-citizen parkgoers, who have complained about aggressive skateboarders who, they say, dart through crowds. Horowitz once described skaters as his group’s number-two concern after drug dealers, but now they seem to have made themselves scarce, at least while the sun shines.
“Now they know to come out at night,” Horowitz said. “It’s a different crowd then, and we can tolerate that. Now they are circumspect, and I think they are given the ‘blind eye’ treatment [by the police].”
On a recent sunny day around noon in the park, not a single skater could be seen. A Park Enforcement Patrol, or PEP, officer, who spoke anonymously, confirmed that skateboarders rarely come to the park anymore except at night.
“Not too many come even then,” he said, although he indicated that he does eject them from the park on occasion, including at night.
The advent of the skateboard-free Washington Square Park has coincided with what Horowitz has described as a ratcheting up of park security. Indeed, no less than five Police Department and PEP vehicles were spotted in the park on the day the PEP officer was interviewed for this article.
Horowitz attributes the absence of daytime skaters to the high numbers of police.
“I congratulate the N.Y.P.D. for their work,” he said.
Villager photo by Robert Kreizel
A student from the East Side Community School on E. 11th St. practiced a few moves at Open Road Park, at 12th St. and Avenue A.While the transition of Washington Square Park from a popular skateboarding center to a no-go zone has not been entirely quiet — Horowitz says he was recently pushed down by a father whose sons Horowitz had told to stop skateboarding — skaters themselves are not particularly fazed by the new enforcement.
One skateboarder, Max, who said he grew up across the street from Washington Square Park and skateboarded there when he was young, explained that he was used to skating spots being demolished.
“There’s always new spots being discovered as they shut down old ones,” he said as he relaxed in Rival Skateshop on Hudson St. near Canal St. “Manhattan is getting harder to find them in, though. Now I’ve been exploring Brooklyn and Queens.”
Of course, skateboarders are accustomed to antagonism, and fairly or not, they are seen as principled anti-authoritarians.
That sentiment did emerge in interviews. Max’s friend, Ashtoi, who works at Rival, said that he still goes to the park at night, and sometimes gets thrown out.
“I just come back a few hours later,” he said, grinning. “People will skate no matter what.”
Unlike many other public and private parks, Washington Square’s new granite benches do not have skate deterrents, or “stoppers” — small metal ribs attached to the stone that prevent what are known as “grinds,” in which skateboarders scrape their metal axles along a smooth, hard surface. Since the stoppers were introduced in 1998, hundreds of millions of them have been added or retrofitted onto new benches and hand railings around the country.
While Ashtoi said that Washington Square’s new granite benches were nice because they lack such stoppers, he noted that such obstacles are easy to take off.
“If you’re determined to skate it,” he said, “you can bust stoppers off.”
But Horowitz and the Parks Department don’t want skaters grinding on the benches, either in the day or night. Horowitz lamented the fact that there wasn’t enough room in the 9.8-acre park for a skateboard park.
“It would be nice if there were a place for skaters,” he said, “but they don’t make up a plurality of youths, and there just isn’t space for it.”
Asked why the park’s fabled three mounds were not available for skateboarders, Horowitz said that they would eventually be covered with Astroturf, rendering them unskateable.
And it is unclear whether such a space in the park would actually deter skateboarders from using prohibited objects for tricks.
While Ashtoi said that he goes to skate parks around town, including one on E. 12th St. and Avenue A, others are less inclined to use such facilities.
One skater on MacDougal St., who gave his name as T.K., said that he used to go to skate parks in California but doesn’t here because they are too crowded.
“They’re just full of kids; it’s not really mellow,” he said. “I’d rather just skate in the streets. New York street skating is really the best.”
Asked whether he ever skated in Washington Square Park, T.K. said he didn’t since it was renovated.
“It’s too precious now,” he said dryly.
