Two years ago, United Nations Plaza was vying for the title of “Saddest Place in San Francisco.” A sunny brick promenade surrounded by government buildings, the plaza had become a trash-strewn dumping ground for the city’s most vexing problems.
A typical weekday scene might have included a team of paramedics reviving a limp teenager overdosing on fentanyl, against a backdrop of merchants selling stolen cellphones and a fountain being repurposed as a toilet.
For a city struggling to recover after the Covid-19 pandemic, the images of suffering and bedlam could not have been more inconveniently placed: U.N. Plaza, a block from City Hall, has a busy rail station and is bordered by Market Street, a major thoroughfare that double-decker tour buses cruise daily. In 2023, after a big, international conference announced that it was coming to the hobbled city, the parks department scrambled to find a new life for the site.
That turned out to be a skateboard park. On a recent sunny morning, kids in baggy pants slid the railings around a flagpole and cruised over a volcano-shaped embankment. The old granite ledges that used to be illegal to skate on were now open to grind and slide.
Inviting a bunch of skaters to rip around, scuffing ledges, is not the use San Francisco had in mind in 1975 when the plaza was dedicated to commemorate the founding of the United Nations in the city. U.N. Plaza was part of a larger redevelopment meant to attract affluent shoppers to San Francisco from the suburbs. Instead, for the next four decades, the city produced regular reports of failure that highlighted assaults and drug use on the plaza, and high vacancies in the buildings surrounding it. For all the thought that went into the open design and gushing fountain, it was never clear what people were supposed to do there.
A defining feature of the new skate park (or skate plaza, the name the city and skaters prefer) is that it’s a retreat from the grandeur that characterized earlier efforts. It also seems to be working better, with a $2 million price tag and just a few months of planning, than the catalog of failed projects, costing hundreds of millions, that preceded it.
Nobody is saying the plaza’s makeover has solved the deep, systemic problems that made the area a hub for addicts and homeless people. The dealers who previously congregated there have migrated to a spot near the very next train stop.
What the transformation of U.N. Plaza does show, however, is that attempts at urban revival can go a long way for relatively little money when they attract a natural constituency of users. Obvious as that may sound, it’s the opposite of how planners in San Francisco and elsewhere have historically operated. The notion that a great public space is defined by architecture first, people second, was so ingrained in the city’s thinking that it took the squalor brought on by the pandemic to reverse it.
“U.N. Plaza was created with all these wrongheaded urban-planning ideas of the 1960s, that you need grand plazas and grand connectors, which works great for eight parades a year and kind of fails otherwise,” said John King, an author and a former architecture critic for The San Francisco Chronicle.
“The smart thing here,” he added, “was the city realizing that a good way to get people somewhere is to create a looser space where certain types of people just want to be, in this case skateboarders.”
An Easy-to-Please Constituency
I should probably acknowledge that I grew up in and around San Francisco and have been skateboarding since I was 10 in the late ’80s. But I’m not being a homer when I say that while Los Angeles is the cradle of the sport, San Francisco has long had an outsize role in skateboard culture.
It’s the home of Thrasher Magazine, for starters. And unlike their peers in suburban Southern California, where a typical day of skateboarding can include two hours of driving between spots, San Francisco skaters use the city as a skate park, “bombing” hills in traffic and honing their tricks in downtown squares alongside office workers eating their salads.
Until recently, the city’s default position was that skaters who showed up in its plazas were a nuisance to be removed. Most of the time this played out as a cordial cat-and-mouse game in which the city and building owners shooed skaters away knowing they’d be back again later.
Occasionally it got aggressive, with the police issuing tickets, confiscating boards and removing the obstacles skaters are attracted to. Market Street used to be lined with black granite benches whose hard, smooth edges are a perfect surface to grind. The benches become so popular for skateboarding that the city hauled them off to a municipal yard where no one could use them.
The Police Department’s approach to illegal skateboarding has lightened up in recent years as homelessness and open drug use have eclipsed everything else. After the pandemic and remote work hollowed out downtown San Francisco, the city realized that skaters might offer a way to bring people back.
“Healthy activities give people a reason to congregate for positive reasons rather than congregating for, you know, bleaker reasons,” said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the Recreation and Park Department.
Today the city and the local skate community have what you might call a working relationship. Anytime the parks department considers adding legal skateboarding to a new space, Mr. Ginsburg said, he calls a handful of skaters for advice. One thing he has learned, he said, is that skateboarders do not need much to be happy.
Consider a 2022 project to put a small skate park on a barren stretch of asphalt on Waller Street at the edge of Golden Gate Park. The strip had long been a pop-up skate spot with a few small obstacles and a makeshift ramp. The city wanted to lean into the identity and asked what it could do to help.
The answer, said Ashley Rehfeld, a local skater who works as a marketing strategist in the skate industry, was to outfit the park with the granite benches that the city had yanked from Market Street.
“And the city was like, ‘Wait, that’s all that needs to happen?’” Ms. Rehfeld said in an interview.
So one day, at the city’s invitation, she and a small group of skaters drove to the yard and walked around spray-painting X’s on the pieces they wanted. The city loaded them up on a truck and used a crane to install them at the skaters’ direction. Including a resurfacing of the street, the total cost of renovation came to $218,000 — an impressively low figure in a city that once put a $1.7 million price tag on a single public toilet.
Another thing that Mr. Ginsburg said he had learned from working with skateboarders was that they operated as the informal “watchful eyes” that the urbanist Jane Jacobs had described as a crucial element of safe streets. They cover a lot of space, they watch out for one another, and unlike a concert or special event, skaters require no special programming from the city. They just show up in short bursts throughout the day, helping to maintain activity outside working hours.
This, as it happened, was precisely the mix of attributes the city was looking to create at U.N. Plaza.
In November 2022, the month after the Waller project opened, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Meeting announced that it would be held in San Francisco the next year. It was a single conference in a city that used to overflow with them. But after a string of event cancellations, combined with the rolling bad news from companies ending their office leases and abandoning the city, it was a chance to blunt the narrative of decay and bring needed customers to the city’s hotels and restaurants.
The announcement gave the city about a year to make U.N. Plaza work. Mr. Ginsburg started by reaching out to skaters like Ms. Rehfeld, who brought in other skaters and helped design the park. In a city whose reputation for bureaucratic sludge is as famous as its hills and bay views, an attempt to recast a central plaza would normally be a yearslong process full of long meetings and large budgets.
The U.N. Plaza skate park went from conception to completion in eight months. Instead of three public meetings, there was one. The modest budget allowed the parks department to finance it from existing revenue sources. To placate the various naysayers (a group that included the police and federal agencies that have offices on the plaza), Mr. Ginsburg framed the project as an experiment: It could be removed.
But of course one of the biggest advantages was the putrid state of the park, which made it hard to argue that the status quo was preferable.
U.N. Plaza is not some epic skate park: just a bunch of ledges along with a rail and a few small embankments. If you’re a skater, it’s a fun place to pass through for an hour or less. The most popular features seem to be the granite ledges that have been there for decades and a long low curb that looks as if it had been transported from a Costco parking lot.
Most of the people in the plaza do not come for the skateboarding: People drink coffee at bistro tables and take outdoor exercise classes and play table tennis at concrete platforms added with the renovation. On a recent afternoon as I stood in the plaza with Mr. Ginsburg, he interrupted his narration of the park’s odyssey to proudly point out the perfectly ordinary sight of a pedestrian crossing it from a nearby building to the train station. Commuters, he said, used to take the long way around.
“They would never walk through here before,” he said. “Ever.”
A Skateable City
Ocean Howell is a history professor at the University of Oregon whose work focuses on how the built environment shapes social experience. In a 2005 paper, he described skateboarders as “shock troops of gentrification.” Dr. Howell is no hater: He’s a former professional skateboarder who skated for Birdhouse (Tony Hawk’s company) before his career in academia.
The point of his paper is that when skateboarders congregate in tough spaces, they tend to push out addicts and unhoused people — the two groups that sit lower on the civic totem pole than they do. Urban planners have long treated this phenomenon as a pleasant surprise that occurs mostly in out-of-the-way areas. What made U.N. Plaza unique was explicitly harnessing something that is usually random and spontaneous, in a premier location at the center of town.
“It’s in the tool kit of urban planners now,” Dr. Howell said. “It’s the same thing as giving artists incentives to live in lofts in abandoned areas.”
Skaters in San Francisco are both delighted with their new park and wary of being used to displace people.
“I don’t want cities to get the idea that skateboarding is the solution to challenging spaces,” Ms. Rehfeld said.
As it happens, on the day I visited U.N. Plaza, the main branch of the library had an exhibit on San Francisco skateboarding that celebrated “the unique urban features that make the city so skateable, including its iconic concrete ledges.” In addition to photographs and old video tapes, the show had a collection of twisted rebar and chipped bricks that skaters had ripped out of local plazas as mementos. Now they were laid side by side under a protective case next to pictures of skaters doing tricks on them.
Ted Barrow, a local skater and historian who curated the show and was part of the U.N. Plaza redesign, took me on a walking skateboarders’ tour along Market Street. Dr. Barrow is also the host of a Thrasher web series, “This Old Ledge,” which delves into the architectural history of famous skate spots. This makes him a fount of deep-cut facts, like the location of the quarry where a particular ledge came from, and a catalog of tricks done on them.
The tour ended at Embarcadero Plaza, a mecca of 1990s skateboarding. Now the city and a private developer are planning to build a new plaza to replace it as part of yet another redevelopment to reinvigorate the area. Dr. Barrow started a petition to preserve a piece of its skateboarding history.
“A high concrete ledge with a chunky grind will never not be sick to skate,” he said.
During our tour, Dr. Barrow walked me over to one of the ledges that he wants to save. He noted that it was still skateable despite decades of wear. We talked about tricks we had done there and run-ins with the police. Back then, the city didn’t want a premier public space to be taken over by skateboarders. But they kept showing up.
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Conor Dougherty covers housing and development, focusing on the rising costs of homeownership. He is based in Los Angeles.
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