Post 9/11 Skateboarding

September 11th 2001 was an important day in alot of peoples lives for many different reasons. For me it was sad that alot of people had lost family members, but the most direct impact it had on my life at thirteen years old, was the displacement of the skate community that I was involved in and around the World Trade Center. I remember the day it happened when I was in biology class and our teacher Mr. Scott, a bald gay man, with a southern drawl, was called out of the classroom. He came back in and said "Now I have some very sad news ya'll, there has been an accident at the World Trade Center, a plane ran into one of the towers." It sounded pretty unreal at the time. My friend PJ whose family lives two blocks away from the World Trade Center began to cry. It was pretty weird for me to think that his family might not be alive. I had been to their house many times.

In 2001 I had just started skating and was obsessed with it. I skated no matter what, if it was raining I had a board to ride in the rain. If it was night time and I couldn't leave my neighborhood I would skate in front of our apartment building for hours. The only problem with that is that there wasn't much good stuff to skate in the neighborhood at the time. When PJ first took me to Battery Park City is when my mind first opened up to a different kind of skating. In my neighborhood I was used to only skating flatground. In Battery Park City there were stairs, rails, ledges, I thought I was in heaven. I started going there without PJ and began to meet other skaters.

I met a kid one day while skating in Battery Park City and he told me he was leaving Battery Park City cause it sucked, and that he was going to the Brooklyn Banks. I wish I could remember this kid's name or face, but I don't. When I got to the Banks I was amazed. A skatespot that looks like it were made for skating. Banks that flowed like waves, a nine stair with a skater made handrail, some dope ledges. There were so many skaters doing so many tricks I didn't even know the name of. I started going there every weekend. I began to meet more and more skaters and it was with them that I started getting shown other spots in the neighborhood. One of them was the World Trade Center.

The World Trade Center was an awesome skatespot. You could skate the benches in the street and never get kicked out. If you went in the actual plaza you would get kicked out pretty fast. The security guards never tried to take your board, but they were adamant about us not skating there. There was so much stuff there that I just can't seem to find photos of. There was a perfect manual pad that went from low to high, a ledge over a 5 stair(the one Luis smacked his face on trying to 5050 grind), and these perfect marble benches right in front of the towers.

After the tragic events that took place on 9/11, downtown became a no mans land for a long time. I remember not going down there for a month out of fear, even though my mom worked 5 blocks from the World Trade Center. When I finally went back that far downtown it was so different. The cops had taped off the Brooklyn Banks making them temporarily unskateable. I remember going to the other spots and not seeing other skaters for a couple months. The air down there was horrible and it felt dismal. It was like all the energy in that part of city went down with those two towers.

6 months later, it was spring and people returned to skating downtown, but it didn't feel the same anymore. Cops were checking your bags constantly getting off the train, security was heightened at every building so you were getting kicked out all the time, it had changed so much. Eventually I met a skater named Ben Nazario who took me to Thompkins Square park where I would start skating everyday, and still do skate at constantly.