On the granite stairs leading to Houston Hall, serious college students flock with books in hand, anxious for a warm meal inside. Upon the circle of benches in front of the Annenberg School, the wind viciously whips textbook pages as students hustle around the stone obstructions toward the glass doors.
And then there are the skater kids.
They're not Penn students or staff, and they're certainly not municipal workers. But they've been trying to make Penn and Philly their own, rolling toward those stone benches, or toward the fountain at LOVE Park, grinding down the granite ledges near College Hall, or hitting everything in sight in a ride through Center City. Allegedly causing so much damage to public structures that they've managed to make the city itself their enemy. The X Games, held in Philadelphia this past August, may have done their share to "legitimize" the sport nationwide, but in LOVE Park, the skater kids keep on running from the cops.
Philadelphia's skating community holds on vivaciously to its unique stature in the sport. But the commercialism of the day has swallowed the scene's urban roots. Those even tangentially familiar with skating have flipped past the X Games on ESPN 2, and may even have played Tony Hawk's Pro Skater on a PlayStation. Waterless pools, metal rails and the curved ramps of fabricated concrete environments--commonly called skate parks--are today's norm. Images of skaters flung high by vert pipes or ollie-ing onto grind rails, their boards twisting and turning before again connecting with their feet to land the trick, filter through the mind. These are all appropriate images, made more prevalent by increased attention on the X Games and Tony Hawk's national campaign to build skate parks. But this is not "Philly Skating." Skating in Philadelphia is the story of urban creativity, where the features of the city--hydrants, curbs, handrails and stairs--become the exploratory obstacles in the search for new paths down the same familiar streets.
My search into the Philly skating scene brings me to the Dock Street Brewery in the heart of Center City, where before me stands a 30-year-old man, father of a newborn girl, and self-proclaimed innovator of the city's skateboarding scene. Wearing a shirt that reads only "skateboarder," Ricky Oyola, pro skating legend, begins to talk to me over an Amstel Light. Skating began for Oyola in Jersey at age 14 when, like many others, he was urged on by neighborhood friends to buy a board. After graduating and getting a job, Oyola spent each evening crossing the Delaware to meet a friend for an evening of skating through Philly. "About 4 [p.m.] every day we'd skate from his house at 40th and Powelton; we'd skate through Penn's campus to LOVE Park every single day, and then we'd skate home. We covered this city so many times," he reminisces. In July of 1992 he moved to Philadelphia permanently. "I strictly moved here just because I knew what I wanted was skating." But it wasn't so much what he did in Philly as what he couldn't do elsewhere that enabled the city to carve out its own place in the developing world of skateboarding.
"What did you do?" I ask, gnawing on some of his fries.
"We didn't move to California to make our careers as professional skateboarders," he answers, working on a plate of wings. "There are so many other professional skateboarders... in this world.... A lot of them transferred themselves... from here, East Coast... to make it in the skateboarding world. I don't like California and I never wanted to do that, so I proved a point by staying here and making it work."
Oyola, however, didn't merely excel in skills. He learned to use the city in its own unique way. He took advantage of the narrow streets and shortened blocks. He frequented LOVE Park, and incorporated the landmark at 15th Street and JFK Boulevard into the rest of the city's skating environment. For Oyola, there was no one spot or skate park to attend, but an entire city of changing potholes and construction to morph into his own course. "Philadelphia, we knew, was one of the most incredible places in all the world... let alone LOVE Park is one of the best places in the world, but the city is so incredible, how the roads are kind of tight-knit. You push down the road--you push down 10 blocks here, that's the equivalent to like two blocks in New York, which is no fun. You get nowhere in New York. So we knew what we were sitting on--pretty much a gold mine." This use of urban landscape, moving throughout the city on skateboard like any form of transit, is fading into a past, kept alive primarily by Oyola himself, who views his contributions as having shaped the Philadelphia scene. "Most kids in Philadelphia don't skate that way anymore. That's an older style. I skate wherever I go, for the most part.... No one does that anymore," he notes, with a slight hint of disgust at a scene that in many ways is moving away from him. "Whatever, that's what they want to do. That's not `Philly Style.' `Philly Style' means skating down the road. Skating and hitting everything that's in the road on the way to where you're going. We would skate obscure things. We would skate things that you would not normally look at.... That's something that we have done, we've created."
These days, most kids ride the bus to the landmarks, skating LOVE Park and moving on when authorities kick them out. While still operating in an urban setting and not in the confines of a skate park, much of the artistic innovation is lost. Skaters like Oyola can transform the city into more than bricks and stone. They see new paths down tried roads. "Say we're on Walnut, between Ninth and 10th. You go straight but I go up the curb, up over this thing, back across the street, up this curb, over this thing, over the hydrant, over the trolley tracks, boom. I just painted a line right there. You took a photo of that, right there, you'd see nothing but buildings, trees, road, sidewalk... I see a path," Oyola triumphantly proclaims.
In an attempt to incorporate "Philly Style" into the 2001 X Games, an entirely new event was formed using the pre-existing LOVE Park as its center for competition. But events like the X Games work both ways in skating's attempt to be legitimate. While skating isn't allowed in places like LOVE Park, skateboarders like Tony Hawk have used the X Games to bring skating to a more mainstream public. Andrej Tur, a former skater and currently a freelance photographer who has contributed several national skate magazines, notes, "The better the sport does, the better it is for everybody in the industry." But he also concedes that "skating in a contest" such as the X Games "doesn't really represent skateboarding. It represents somebody trying to have a good 60 seconds and win 20 grand." Competitions, though, are not the focus of criticism so much as is the appropriation of skateboarding to make money for networks like ESPN. Oyola, who himself skated in this year's X Games, sees the contest as "the complete opposite of legitimate." To him, ESPN is "strictly just commercial. They're in it just to make the money. Do you think they really like skateboarding?... The X Games, ESPN, the network, they don't give two shits about skating." While that may be so, the X Games have garnered much attention for the sport. And attention, in the end, is the goal of many skaters. Even Oyola, in all his artistic flare, believes skating is "about you getting noticed." Innovation can lead to corporate sponsorship. At first, that might mean free gear or clothing, but as one progresses and gets publicity throughout the skating community, videos are made and photographs are taken in an attempt not only promote the skater, but, more important, to promote the company. Skateboarding walks a fine line between commercialism and professionalism. The difference between ESPN and a skateboarding gear company like Alien Workshop is its involvement in the sport. Apparel and skateboard manufactures were at one point skateboarders themselves, and as Tur sees it, "the whole industry is kinda self sufficient." He continues, "It's all the companies that have made products specifically for skateboarders. Like Vans [Skate] Shoes is a skateboard company, and those shoes were made by skaters for skaters." Nevertheless, with at least four national skateboarding publications, the sport still carries with it an air of illegality. Most shots taken of skaters grinding a rail in LOVE Park or performing a "360 shove it" over a city trash can are actually shots of ticketable offenses. "[Photographers] are professional in the sense that they take quality photos..., but the whole skateboarding world is `we do what we want wherever we want, whenever we want' and we have to work around cops, security guards," Oyola says.
While the skateboarding community battles between professionalism and commercialism, the city hasn't provided much help beyond banning the sport in LOVE Park. Much of the concern surrounds issues of vandalism and destruction of public property. After telling kids to leave LOVE Park, one Fairmount Park Commission ranger who asked to remain anonymous tells me about her duty. "I hate being up here," she says. She says she would "rather have kids out here skating" than getting into more serious trouble. But her job is her job, and with black marks on ledges, chipped benches and wobbly blocks ("City officials blame skateboarders for the broken granite blocks and chipped ledges, and they estimate it would cost more than $1 million to completely repair the plaza and similar damage at City Hall," notes a Philadelphia Inquirer story from last month), the city has made it a point to rid the park of skaters. "We've had a lot of complaints from people eating in the park," she adds. "If skateboarders were more polite to the people it might not be a problem." She admits, with much chagrin, that it might be too late for any serious change.
And so, too, it seems that it's too late for any real agreement between skaters and city authorities. And despite the X Games' popularity, stereotypes abound. "People look at skateboarding in a very negative way," Tur says. "It takes a pedestrian seeing an undercover cop tackling a 16-year-old kid" for the pedestrian to assume that the skater is in the wrong. And yet, antagonism runs both ways. "I don't skate to piss people off," Oyola says. "I piss people off while I skate, but that is not my reason." It is, however, the "reason" that creates misunderstanding. Neither side understands the other's perspective. For skaters, black marks are superficial. "What we get out of it, it's so outrageous that if they really could comprehend that, they would let us [skate]," Oyola implores, continuing, "People who don't skate are not involved.... It's like, `We don't give a shit what you can do, just don't hit that trash can.' Why? It's a trash can--you put trash in it.... You have a problem with that because technically we're not using it for trash?" On the other hand, trash cans are knocked on their sides and black marks do appear along ledges.
Regrettably, there seem to be few solutions. Tur notes that parents are tiring of their kids coming home with skateboarding citations or hearing reports that a plainclothes cop chased their child through the park. And he believes that parental response has contributed to efforts to create skate parks where kids can skate legally. But this isn't the ideal solution for everyone, and I'm reminded of Oyola's Philly Style of street skating and the notion that skate parks can't compare to the typical urban environment. "Skate parks are popping up everywhere," Oyola rants. "The government is trying to force kids into skate parks by giving tickets, making ordinances and making bans. Their trying to force us into areas, and that's kinda weird cause I'm 100 percent anti-that." "That" is any sort of control on skaters' freedom to utilize the public arena in the way they see fit. Oyola therefore supports a charity called Franklin's Paine, whose goal is to create areas of urban turf that are legal for skaters to use. In the end, though, it isn't about legality or legitimacy, or cops or commercialism, but rather, the high school kids who flood into the city from the Philly suburbs and Jersey, skipping school to ride their boards through the urban landscape.
The fountain spray pops and explodes under its falling weight as water propels water high above the stilted LOVE sign on 15th Street. Back west, the cement ramp and rails glide along beside College and Williams Hall, sloping downward toward Wynn Common, where the enormous Penn shield dominates Perelman Quadrangle. A skater kid coasts toward a ledge--this time near a fountain downtown, but it just as well could be near a Penn seal--his knees bending beneath him before he springs up and out toward the concrete edge. His board follows suit. His arms flung outward in a precarious attempt to balance, the middle of the board settles along the ledge, scraping him across the shelf. As he nears the end of the concrete he pushes off, and he and his board glide away from the wall and toward the ground, connecting with earth in one solid jolt. A large smile chases away the concentration as he looks up to see if anyone noticed, but no one is there to share in his success. So alone, he basks in glory as he nears the next ledge, lifting off the ground again and crashing without the same precision into the wall, propelling board and body out of unity and into a sprawl on the concrete ground. This is a typical story, but that day's story belongs to Rick Rutherford.
Rutherford, a high school senior, skips school along with his three sophomore friends for an afternoon of skating LOVE Park. Rick fails a trick and hurls a trash can onto its side as his friends scramble to save it from spilling into the fountain. Frustrated, he lifts his board as if to smash it in two, but, knowing better, he hurls it upward onto the grass. Later one of his friends, a small kid who is now limping after an earlier spill, challenges Rick: "Ride on that, gap on this." And so Rick climbs onto a 10-foot high wall that can't be more than four feet across. He moves forward along the ledge, the skateboard clicking over the cracks toward a lower shelf onto which he hopes to propel himself. Just as he reaches the edge, 10 feet above an unforgiving concrete surface, he pulls himself up short. "That's fucking balls--that's fucking balls--I'll kill myself doing this," he says to his challenger, grabbing his board and wisely accepting defeat. Only minutes later, he is zooming toward a flight of six stairs just as the aforementioned ranger begins to scold his friends. Focusing on the task at hand, he pushes toward the stairs, launching into space before landing the trick without a hitch. "Yes! I got it!" he screams to his friends, now speaking with the ranger. "Kick me out now, cause I got it"
