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Redevelopment and the Fruits of Xenophobia
When telling the
history of street skating, it is impossible to overemphasize the
importance of the Golden Gateway Redevelopment area in downtown San
Francisco. Until 1961, it was a 51-acre produce market run by Italian
immigrants from North Beach, with streets reminiscent of the old Les
Halles. Led by the autocratic and classist Justin Herman—San Francisco’s
answer to Robert Moses—the Redevelopment Agency designated the area as
"blighted." This is a medical term that describes a spreading
pathology; and for Redevelopment agencies nationwide, this designation
was all that was needed to invoke eminent domain. (See Michael Doherty's
and Meryl Block's "The Rivitalization of the Fillmore" in this
journal for a description of the official criteria used to assess
blight.)
The type of street
skating that was practiced in the suburban parking lot was, by and large,
limited to curbs and sidewalks. Street skating as urban pathology—the
type that constantly damages planters, handrails, fountains, and anything
else that is found in a city street—was born in the Golden Gateway, and
the Bunker Hill Redevelopment area in Los Angeles (where the first
handrail was skated by Mark Gonzales, one of the inventors of street
skating). Were it not for these redevelopment projects, it is possible
that skateboarding would have never mutated past its more benign
form—destroying only curbs, which cities and corporations were not
particularly concerned about. As Justin Herman constantly noted, the produce market was crowded and chaotic; it would
have been no more possible to skate there than it is in San Francisco's
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"May 24, 1956. 5:50 AM. Washington looking west from Davis." After Justin Herman, this site in the produce market would become one of the birthplaces of modern street skating, "Hubba Hideout." (Image from the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection.)
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present-day Chinatown. You cannot skate in a fine-grained city, you need
the scale and austerity of the auto-friendly super block. Also,
skateboarding is very difficult: it took thousands of hours to develop
all of the permutations that exist today. The defensive architecture of
redevelopment was a laboratory for skateboarding: vast plazas, full of
modernist architecture, that were empty most of the time.
Skidmore, Owings
and Merrill (SOM) prepared the original plan for the Golden Gateway, and
in 1971 the centerpiece became Lawrence Halprin's Justin Herman Plaza.
The benches and higher ledges in this plaza were the first to be
completely worn out by skateboarding—their edges ground down by the
trucks of the skateboards. Popularly known as "EMB," short for
Embarcadero, this plaza was "the birthplace of much of what makes up
modern street skating" (Carroll June 1999, 72). It was
skateboarding's "Holy Land" (Carroll June 1999, 72), as the
addresses on the tickets that the police issued attest: Buenos Aires,
Argentina; London, England; Naples, Italy; and Saga, Japan. (Costantinou
June 14, 1999). They all came for EMB. Its redesign in 1999 prompted an
outpouring of somber, indignant eulogies worthy of the old Penn Station.
Another prominent
feature of the Golden Gateway is a series of skyways that connect office
buildings to apartments to elevated plazas to John Portman's muzak-filled
Embarcadero Center. The plazas are eerily pleasant but they present
monolithic, two story walls to the street. The urban critic Trevor Boddy
notes, in his essay "The Analogous City," that the historical
precursor to this formation was the Medici family's skyways over sixteenth
century Florence (1999, 128). They were built as an escape route for when
street fights erupted, and as an elevated point from which the family
could safely observe the vitality of the streets without having to
participate in them. Right around the corner from EMB, there is a
fortified skyway entrance to the plaza surrounding SOM's Alcoa building.
Ironically, this defensive design destroys the self-regulating potential
of the space by reducing the number of eyes in the space, and thereby
creates a vacuum that can be populated by indigents. This space is known
as "Hubba Hideout"—"hubba" is slang for drugs. When
skateboarders took the place over, they actually made it safer.
The creative
misuses of architecture that were developed here quickly spread all over
the world through the skateboard media. If you go to any modern city in
the world—whether you speak the language or not—and say "EMB"
or "Hubba," the local skaters will take you directly
to their city's equivalents: a plaza with deep steps and a tall ledge
going down stairs. Although most skaters don't know the full history of
redevelopment, the San Francisco skaters do know that Justin Herman was a
classist, if not a racist; and they treat him with sarcastic reverence. Slap's
eulogy for EMB was titled "Remembering Our Old Pal Justin
Herman." There is no doubt that it would have infuriated Herman to
learn that he had unwittingly helped to create a whole new urban
pathology, but as William H. Whyte points out in City, "fears
proves itself" (1988a, 158).
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