99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-71- In and Out of LOVE

Episode Date: January 23, 2013

Though its officially name is JFK Plaza, the open space near Philadelphia’s City Hall is more commonly known as LOVE Park. With its sleek granite benches, geometric raised planter beds, and long expanses of pavement, its success as a pedestrian … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Wars. Oh God! Thank you, thank you, thank you! My whole Dan life has been worth it. Yes for this moment. So I was once walking the city with my friend Kathleen, who is an environmental scientist, and she was pointing out the spray painted markings of letters and arrows that you see everywhere on the street. The markings indicate where utility lines are running underground so they're not damaged by construction. And it turns out they're color-coded by the American Public Works Association. Red's spray paint means electrical power lines and yellow is natural gas.

And I'm looking this up now on Wikipedia because I don't remember all the details. Green means sewage and drainage lines. So public works people and construction crews have their own low-fi, augmented reality scribbled right on the street, like a giant map in plain sight. It's a different way to see the city. But it's not just utility workers. The city also reads differently depending on your knowledge, your experience, or if you happen to be standing on a rolling plank of wood.

I've been lucky enough to go to these amazing places like Taiwan or LA, but I only ever get to see the weird places that skaters go to, like industrial parks or some handrail in the middle of a school somewhere. That's our guide today, skateboard photographer and radio reporter Andrew Norton. My friend Ariel and I are skating in downtown Toronto, kind of carving through the big empty corporate plazas. It's hard with a backpack. I'll give you one of these though. To a skateboarder, the city looks different. Something I definitely always do is, um, just look for opportunities to escape when I can't.

I can't help myself. We can possibly look for things like ledges or curb cuts, mundane stuff that people walk right past. But to escape order, even a pole that's been bent by a car is a thing to escape. So you're always on the hunt. Like, I'll make my wife stop the car if I see something new. Dude, I even like, I even when I'm watching movies

we'll be looking for spots. Ha ha ha, you look for spots in movies? Whoa, Andrew. Like, I've watched the Simpsons and I'm like, you could skate that hubbub. You know what? I guess I do that too. Wait, what's a hubbub?

A hubbub is what skaters call a ledge that runs down a flight of stairs parallel to the stairs. And it's named after a famous spot in San Francisco called hubba hideout. Hubba is slang for crack. So I guess people used to hang out, they're used to gather there to smoke crack. It's particularly skateboard worthy.

Yeah, because it's this perfect ledge that runs parallel down the flight of stairs. I mean, ask any skater go to any skate park, you know, every skater will know what a hubba is. And that is how I'm going to exclusively refer to them from now on. I'm always looking for things like that. Black wax, caked on a ledge, or wheel marks on a wall.

These are little breadcrumb trails left by my people. And once you start following these trails, they'll lead you to a turf war between the city and the skaters. Oh, this spot here. Have you ever skated these? This has long been known as a spot to meet up. And more recently, they put some stoppers on it to prevent people from skating. So a skate stopper is anything that someone might add to something we'd want to skateboard on

to stop us from skateboarding on it. So in this case, on these long, kind of S-shaped granite benches that we're looking at, they put strips of granite kind of running the width of the bench so that we can't ride along the top of it. Normally people would be sliding on this and then get this or grinding on this and then come to a stop against these. I imagine most people don't know what they're there for. So as skateboarders, I think we're hypersensitive and very aware of these small things that get added.

Well, one of the most traditional type of thing you'll see will be some kind of a metal peg or raised metal attachment that is either built into a wall or attached to a wall afterwards. And what that does is it creates a discontinuous edge. Tony Bricoli is an architect from Philadelphia. He's fascinated with how skaters interact with the city. And though he's not a skateboarder himself, Tony's always kept tabs on the types of anti-skating measures the city can deploy.

And then it gets more extreme and more ridiculous where the companies that sell things that look like metal seashells and metal crabs that I guess for some reason that's meant to be more aesthetically pleasing, I don't know. Those aesthetically pleasing skate stoppers are all around the Embarcad'Aro in San Francisco. To Tony, the reason why modern cities

are so perfect for skateboarding, goes back to a French dude named Lake Corbusier. Tony Bracale wrote an essay called Thanks, Look a Bousier, from the skateboarders. In it, he intends that Look a Bousier as the platonic ideal of the modernist architect with his cool glasses and love of concrete is the patron saint of skateboarders. Modernists were the ones that reinterpreted a bench in a park as a slab of granite.

Reinterpreted, you know, kind of flowing landscapes, grassy areas as these kind of paved open plaza spaces. And it just turned out that wide open space with nice gran at ledges at the edge made really good skateboarding space. And who would have known? The prime example of modernist landscape architecture that's inadvertently perfect for skateboarding is Philadelphia's love park. It's real name is JFK Plaza, but it's called love park after Robert and Yana's giant love statue with that slanted O that was put there for the United States by Centennial. In the center of Philadelphia's City Hall and if you draw a line from City Hall to the Art Museum there's a diagonal boulevard that connects the two and along that axis is where

Love Park was placed. The two tiered plaza takes up an entire city block. In the center, long, wide steps cascade down to a giant circular fountain. Above on the main level, granite planters surround the plaza as well as lots of rectangular and marble benches. It's a space only a modernist or a skateboarder could love. And it's awesome for skating because you can do what we call lines, which is like a series of tricks. So you could do like a switch crook on one of the benches and then a fakey tray flip.

And then if you wanted to, you could do like a switchback tail on another part of the park. Oh, and the granite tiles can even be pried up to make little ramps to launch off. The park was conceived for the late Edmund Bacon as part of his undergraduate thesis at Cornell. He later made the park a reality as the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning

Commission with the help of architect Vincent Kling. Ed's been a big deal in the architecture world since the 50s when he shaped how Philly looks today. His vision for the city even put him on the cover of Time Magazine. He also happens to be the father of Kevin Bacon, really. Now you're one level away from Kevin because you're talking to me, though,

and I'm actually waiting, that'd be two, right? Actually, I think that's four degrees. This is the closest I've been in that game. This is very exciting. So there you go, my friend. I'm happy I could help you there. Bacon's designed turned out to be perfect for skateboarding. And then the 80s, when skating took to the streets,

the timing was perfect for skaters to claim love park as their own. You know, there was kind of suburb to migration. There was less interest in density. And so places like Love Park were kind of sitting there, not being used. In the early 90s, skaters started filming themselves at Love Park. And the videos found their way to the epicenter of the skate world, California. Suddenly Philadelphia was a destination for skaters.

And as the skateboarding industry grew, so did the popularity of Love Park. By the late 90s, pro skaters moved to Philly just to skate it every day. They built their career shooting photos for glossy skateboard magazines of the park. You could even virtually skate there in Tony Hawk's famous video game.

So as an awkward 14 year old passing through Philly on vacation, I was like, Dad, we gotta go to Love Park. So I got to skate the ledges and stairs I saw in videos and on my PlayStation. While my dad read the newspaper by the fountain. I wouldn't be that excited again until I got my braces off. Even though Love Park was like Mecca, it was never legal to skate there. I don't think it's legal to skate at Mecca either.

Skaters would get tackled by cops, ticketed by undercoverers, or have their boards taken away. The ship's off the way. We're going to be on the way. We're going to be on the way. We're going to be on the way. And the area was gentrifying.

Finally, in 2002, Philly Mayor John Street took the skateboard band a step further and renovated the park. The major thing that they did was they removed all of the granite benches, these great skateable elements, and they replaced them with, you know, kind of, um, Williams and Sonoma-ish looking wood benches that looked like they belonged in 1890s, kind of park. Disguised as decoration, the new features were meant to make it harder for skaters to use the ledges or to cruise from one end of the park to the other. So they took away the wide open paved areas and tried to replace them

with grassy spaces in between. You know adding some landscaping, adding an actual lawn was a good idea, but the design result was kind of horrible. It's just a very uncomfortable space and not a space that people want to use. People protested the renovations. There were rallies and newspaper articles. One story read, the mayor blindly took a root of time-honored Philadelphia tradition in destroying a source of pride and fame, harder and by its own citizens. A big skateboard shoe company called DC even offered up a million dollars to keep the park the way it was and to kind of offset any damages skaters might have done over the years.

The city of Philadelphia declined the offer. City counselors and architects like Tony spoke out too. I think there would have been a way to make some significant adjustments to love park that would accommodate other kinds of activities without totally compromising skateboarding and come up with a successful evolution of the space. I think that that would have been possible. I think politically it was, that would have been too difficult. Love Park drew people to the city. Philadelphia even hosted this big skateboard competition called the X Games, the two summers prior to getting rid of Love Park. But, you know, unlike traditional sports, skateboarding is kind of hard

to control and difficult to monetize. And that's usually a little scary to the squares. But not to Ed Bacon. Bacon was thrilled that his space was evolving. Here he is from a 2006 documentary called Freedom of Space. would creatively adapt to the environment they already found. And that it was their joy to adapt themselves physically to what was already there. Bacon was so against the renovations and cracked down on skaters in his park he staged his own protest. On October 8th, 2002, with the media there, two

people propping him up on either side and a blue bicycle helmet on. A white hair trench coat clad 92-year-old Ed Bacon wrote a skateboard in Love Park. Held up and pushed along on a skateboard might be a more accurate description. And now I, Edmund Dunn-Bacon, in total defiance of Mayor Good Abghana, in total defiance of Mayor Street and the Council of the City of Philadelphia. Hereby, exercise my rights as the citizens of the United States, and I deliberately skate in my beloved love park. Woo!

Oh, hold on. I can't see for my office. Oh, God! Thank you, thank you, thank you! My whole damn life has been worth it just for this moment. Man life has been worth it just for this moment. The ugly pink planters and William and Sonoma benches stole Grey Slow Park, but so does a plaque memorializing Ed Bacon and people still skateboard there

and they still get chased by cops. Skaters now figure out ways to work around the redesign. Something Ed Bacon would probably be proud of. Love Park isn't the iconic spot it used to be, but Skate Park started copying features from its original design. There's a good chance that if a skate park was built in your area in the last 10 years, it'll have a knee-high, modern-estile bench, or maybe even those same cascading long steps like the ones in Love Park. You'll also see things like hubbos like we talked about earlier or

even a low block of concrete beside a small set of stairs. We call that a pure seven ledge named after another San Francisco spot. These are all design elements that were dreamt up by some well-meaning city planner and they're now worshipped by skaters. Tony, the architect we heard from, is now working on a skate friendly city plaza. That's right, near LoveFuck. I gotta admit, pardon me thinks these designated places to skateboard

kinda miss the point. It's like running a marathon on a treadmill. It's not exactly the type of thing that'll get you on the cover of Runner's World. But guys like Tony are legitimizing skating to designers and architects. He gets it. A skate park is now something that real architects can have a hand in.

But part of the excitement of street skating is happening upon that spot that wasn't meant to be skated, but seems like it was built exactly for a certain trick. It's like found art. That's why we're still hunting for spots in the streets. Pro skaters now fly out to China for three weeks at a time to skate the new sprawling marble plazas that seem to pop up there on a daily basis. And because skateboarding isn't as popular there, the war on skaters hasn't seemed to reach China yet. Modernist architecture appears,

then skaters, then skate stoppers. And in a way, without really knowing it, we're kind of critiquing the design. Skaters say, we don't care what you made it for. This is how we're using it. And when you land a trick there, it's like a secret victory. You put your own Mark on a place. And now even us squares can read those marks, too. 99% Invisible with Produce this week by Andrew Norton. I don't know if a lot of radio shows really like to mention Smoking Crack at the front

of their show. With help from Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars, It's a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, I tweet at Roman Mars, but what pictures of hubbob hideouts, skaters bounding over love Park as photographed by Mike Playback and the amazing video of Edmund Bacon Define Authority on a skateboard courtesy of our friends at WHYY. Oh God! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! It's all at 99%invisible.org.

This, I feel like this, what Ed Bacon says here, should be like the pledge of allegiance for skateboarders. Like, whenever you go skateboard, you should be like, I, Andrew Norton, hereby exercise my right as a citizen of Canada, and I deliver really skateboard. Radio to you. From PRX. you