The Holy Banks
HUCK pays homage to this iconic skate spot and asks: how does urban wasteland become hallowed ground?
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Brooklyn Bridge is one of America’s most iconic structures. Built in 1883, it has come to represent the aspirations of generations of Americans. But what you can’t see in the legions of pictures, TV shows and movies in which it appears, is that it is also home to one of skateboarding’s most legendary landmarks, the Brooklyn Banks. Nestled beside the bridge’s giant struts, the Banks have been a Mecca for New York City’s skaters for thirty-seven years.
There are two great ironies about the Banks. For starters, they aren’t in Brooklyn. They are on the Manhattan side of the bridge in an area that was residential for most of New York City’s history. In 1969, city engineers, as they tend to do in New York, wiped half a city block off the map to construct two giant off-ramps for the bridge. It was in the deep shadows of these ramps that the banks were built, as part of a larger development project, in 1973. And therein lies our second irony: the other part of that project was 1 Police Plaza, the newly constructed headquarters for the New York City Police Department. Despite (or perhaps in spite of) the police presence, New York’s skate community found a home at the Banks, claiming it as their own in the mid-eighties, and nurturing it into the stuff of legend throughout the nineties. Although the Upper Banks were lost to renovation in 2004, local skaters fought to preserve the Lower Banks, and even got the city to add rails and ledges to the spot.
But location means nothing without inspiration, and that’s where the red bricks come in. The Banks are made up of hundreds of thousands of them, precisely arranged into great ochre waves, smoother and prettier than any caught on the beaches of Long Island. Landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg created them, but even he couldn’t predict that they would become so much more than just a pile of bricks. “So kids like to skateboard there now?” he chuckles. “It certainly wasn’t designed with skating in mind… I don’t have a rationale when I design. So much of it is intuitive, like Stravinsky said, ‘It’s not premeditated, it’s all trial and error.’”
Everyone has a tale from the Banks, like the time Vallely ollied over the iron fence designed to prevent skaters doing tricks over the Banks’ wall. Or when Ron Wilkinson’s 2Hip BMX competition welcomed over a thousand people, with even the police showing up to watch, despite Wilkinson’s lack of a permit. Through these stories - passed on by word of mouth, magazines, videos and the Internet - the culture develops the spot, and the spot develops the culture, until the lines between the two become as fluid as the ones traced by wheels over asphalt.
Every popular skate spot in the world has some combination of attractive terrain, reliable access and a dedicated community who make it their own. But only the best spots combine all of their elements to create myths. Not falsities, or fairy tales, but a way of understanding and sharing in a culture. Like D.H. Lawrence said: “Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.” Looking at it like this, mythology is the reason Tom Carroll is remembered for his under the lip snap at the 1991 Pipeline Masters competition. It’s the reason every snowboarder in the world has watched Travis Rice 1080 Chad’s Gap. Myths brought us Jeff Hackman dropping acid at twenty-five foot Waimea bay, and Terje Haakonsen dropping into the chute at 7,000 feet on Peak 7601.
Mythology is also the reason that every skater who visits New York City feels compelled to stop by the Banks and pay homage. They’re the primeval, and the quintessential; and even now, as they face four long years of closure at the hands of oblivious bureaucrats, it beggars belief to imagine skating in New York City without them. Even if we aren’t from the area, even if we’ve never set foot on those bricks, we’ve heard the stories, read the articles, seen the pictures and watched the videos. The Banks are a part of us, and us, a part of them.
For the full article check out HUCK#019, out now.
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The Holy Banks (text) by Tetsuhiko Endo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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