Airlines generally allow you to bring your skateboard as a carry-on item. The people who do this are, I would guess, either children or good at skateboarding. I was once one of these things, and am now neither. Even if my flight did allow it, I worried it would cause havoc in the overhead bins; I couldn’t handle the thought of arguing my case to rollerboard-toting businessmen the same age as me. No — the board would have to be checked. While packing, I discovered it was too long for even my biggest duffel, so I grabbed my golf travel bag from the basement, wrapped the board in plastic and threw my clothes in with it. Shouldering a half-flaccid golf bag through the airport, I looked like a sight gag from an old Playboy cartoon. But at least I didn’t have to bring my skateboard into the Air France lounge.
My destination: Malmo, Sweden, a once-gritty shipbuilding town that has refashioned itself over the last two decades into the type of place this newspaper might recommend you spend 36 hours in. One minor but fascinating element of Malmo’s postindustrial turnaround has been an effort to incorporate skateboarding into the fabric of the city. Even more tolerant urban governments in the United States tend to cordon skaters off in parks, sometimes very nice ones, but in southern Sweden, they’ve been trying something different: treating skateboarding like a unique source of vitality rather than a nuisance to be managed. I flew there at the end of August to see the crowning achievement of Malmo’s efforts — the reconstruction of one of the most iconic spots in skateboarding history, imported, piece by piece, from Philadelphia.
John F. Kennedy Plaza single-handedly made Philly a skateboarding town. It’s better known as Love Park, after the Robert Indiana sculpture that was installed there in 1976, and is much better known among skateboarders than the civilian public. The park was laid out in the 1960s, part of an effort to revitalize Philadelphia as its industrial base declined, a place for the new Organization Man to take lunch al fresco. Within a couple of decades, it would become a magnet for the city’s growing homeless population, thinning out the lunch crowd while creating room for a new species to emerge: the puffily shod, baggily pantsed street skater of the 1990s.
Love’s heyday coincided with the apex of skateboarding’s predigital monoculture, an era when print magazines and VHS tapes still defined its boundaries. In a relatively information-poor environment, Love could enjoy a level of exposure and mystique now unimaginable for a skate spot, or anything else, really. It was featured in magazines and videos constantly. And it was, judging from these, a sort of paradise: granite ledges blackened with wax, more than enough to go around; pavers that could be wrenched out of the ground with skateboards, propped up and made into ramps; an enormous fountain at the bottom lined with more waxed granite. The ground, also made of granite, looked smooth — it sounded smooth, too. Love nurtured a technical sort of skateboarding, one focused on precision and style, on stringing together long lines of tricks, a demonstration of mastery made possible by the plaza’s serendipitously perfect layout.
But what was truly thrilling about Love was that skateboarding happened there at all. It was a plaza in the middle of a Northeastern metropolis, monumental and purpose-built for something else. If you squint at the footage, you can almost make out William Penn himself, standing atop City Hall just across the street, overseeing the action. This unlikely proximity eventually led to problems. After battling the skaters for years, the city demolished and redesigned the plaza in 2016.
Love’s apex also happened to align with the beginning of my long and unimpressive skate career. As a teenager, I watched Love footage with awe via my family’s VCR in San Francisco. I learned the layout of this plaza I had never actually seen, piecing it together from countless clips. But I never got to skate there. Now, on the eve of my 40th birthday, having for the last 20 years managed the decline of whatever modest talents I ever possessed, and saddled with some of the most serious impediments to skateboarding in the known universe (child, career, golf), I had a chance.
And so, nearly a decade after Love’s demolition, I found myself jet-lagged on a cool August morning, watching a surprisingly large team of neon-clad city workers install the spot’s final touch: a streetlamp that had graced the original park for decades. It was an insectlike work of high Modernism with six arms, each clutching a frosted globe, and installing it was a delicate process involving a crane truck and a cherry picker. Gustav Svanborg Eden, Love Malmo’s creator, was watching anxiously from an elevated platform a few yards away.
Eden is officially a project manager in Malmo’s Streets, Parks and Property Department, but he is known (sometimes controversially in the Swedish press) as the city’s skate coordinator. A 45-year-old skateboarder himself, Eden has led the campaign to incorporate skateboarding into urban life, sprinkling granite ledges and skateable sculptures and parks throughout the city. (His resources come out of the parks department’s events budget, so Love Malmo is, in somewhat circular fashion, technically a sidewalk improvement done in preparation for the event the city hosted when the spot opened.) At the core of Eden’s work is the belief that skateboarding adds to the life of the city, especially the most disused parts, and that it should be encouraged and nurtured.
Eden and I came upon a trash can, also imported from Center City, Philadelphia, that seemed to illustrate his point. The trash can’s opening had been plugged with a round piece of metal to prevent anyone from using it as anything other than a skate obstacle. “So this is an irony, right?” Eden said. The city’s sanitation workers had objected to the Philly can, saying that the different ergonomics of emptying it put it outside of their contract. “Now the question is: What is it? Well, it is a trash can, and not,” he said. The real point, to him, was the relationship it signified between the city and the skateboarders. “The skaters here, they know that this wasn’t un-trash-canned against them,” he said. The whole thing has been done for them. “That’s different from being disenfranchised and having to break the rules.”
Of course, one of the main ideas in street skateboarding is that you’re supposed to break the rules. You’re not really supposed to go to skate parks; those were built for you, and that sucks. Ideally you can find and misuse something that wasn’t. Love Malmo — an almost preposterously authentic street spot, built with the blessing of city bureaucrats — scrambles this binary. But it’s a binary that has become less sustainable as skateboarding shakes off its adolescent pose. There are now middle-aged skaters on the cover of Thrasher, and middle-aged skaters putting out new pro shoes. Street skateboarding was invented in the ’80s; if it were a dude, he’d be over the hill, too.
Eden joked to me, as the lamppost went in, that the project had taken so long that skaters who cared about Love weren’t even skating anymore. But the truth is that plenty of us are still hanging on. Some of us just barely.
The granite that made up Love Park took shape in the late Devonian period, when a subduction zone formed as the North American Plate collided with — just kidding. The granite’s origin story begins, as far as you or I are concerned, with a Love local named Heather Shaffer. Growing up in and around Philly, Shaffer started skating when she was about 12 and soon found her way to Love. It was an intimidating spot, the sort with opinionated locals obsessed with unwritten rules, but Shaffer loved the smooth granite, and the fact that you could always find people to skate with.
In 1992, a Thrasher feature on Philadelphia claimed that “Cops don’t give a [expletive] where you skate, street or sidewalk, because they’re out there trying to arrest real criminals.” If this was true, it would change as the decade progressed. By the time Shaffer was skating Love in the mid-90s, she had to make up a fake identity to give to the police, pretending to be a Californian named Jen who had no idea skateboarding wasn’t allowed. The busts were so routine that some older skaters figured out that if the spot was getting crowded, they could shout “Five-O!” and clear it out. Shaffer learned to never leave unless she actually put eyes on the cops.
Eventually the city posted signs threatening $300 fines and forfeiture of offenders’ boards. According to one Love local, the police eventually got their hands on a skate tool, a special wrench for dealing with the three sizes of bolts on a skateboard; when they didn’t want to bother with paperwork, they just popped one wheel off and handed back the neutered board. In 2002, the city renovated the plaza to make it less skateable, putting wooden benches and flower boxes in front of the ledges (which were already benches and flower boxes). The city also removed some pavers and replaced them with grass. Skaters lobbied the City Council for relief, to no avail. In 2003, the Republican mayoral candidate vowed to legalize skateboarding at Love, and lost by 17 points. But when the Phillies won the World Series in 2008, and the city erupted in its customary rioting, a group of skaters used the chaos as cover to tear out the flower boxes and benches, throwing them into the fountain below.
Shaffer never stopped skating, even deep into her career in corporate accounting. This meant lots of 80-hour workweeks and late nights at the office, which was fine. Because by then, she and her friends had figured out that the bike cops who patrolled Love went home at 10:30 p.m., leaving them a few hours to skate every night. And Shaffer went pretty much every night that it wasn’t raining. There were three groups of people at Love after dark: the skaters, the homeless and the drug dealers. They formed a loose federation over their one common interest: looking out for undercover cops. The skaters usually made sure to leave before 1 a.m. so the homeless could sleep.
In 2011, when Philadelphia redesigned Dilworth Park, outside City Hall (also a famous skate spot), Shaffer went to meetings about the project and heard city officials talking about the benches, lamenting how they attracted skaters and the homeless alike. They would have to be removed in any redesign. She approached the city, pretending to be a normal nonskateboarder who thought the benches would look nice in her house. She asked if she could buy four of them, offering $5,000. She wanted one for herself; one each to send to her friends, the Love Park icons Josh Kalis and Stevie Williams; and one to set aside to be reinstalled somewhere in Philly, someday. To her surprise, the city agreed.
In the process of doing this, she learned about a nonprofit group run mostly by skaters who were working with the city to build a skatepark. Shaffer was shocked to see the city and skaters collaborating productively. When the city announced plans to redesign Love in 2015, Shaffer and a successor nonprofit, now called Skate Philly, approached the city together about saving the granite. (It didn’t hurt that one of Skate Philly’s core members, Jesse Rendell, was the son of the two-time Philadelphia mayor and two-time Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell.) The city agreed, inviting the skaters to mark the pieces of the plaza they wanted to keep.
A cubic foot of granite weighs about 170 pounds. Shaffer and Skate Philly marked 163 pieces — around 140,000 pounds’ worth. Shaffer rented a Penske flatbed truck and a forklift at her own expense and, with help from friends, Skate Philly and city workers, she started to move the granite in 10,000-pound loads to a city-owned lot. Shaffer took a week off work and tried to organize Love’s remains in a semi-rational fashion. She made a spreadsheet inventorying each piece by dimensions, weight, which pile it had been stored in, whether it had been skated, which part of the plaza it came from and — she hoped — where it might one day be returned. It was then that she first heard someone in Sweden was interested in the materials.
When Eden learned about the granite from friends in Philadelphia, he called the city switchboard and was eventually connected to Bob Allen, a director in the Parks and Recreation Department. Allen knew little about the granite — Eden had been misdirected — but the unusual request got his attention. He had been at a dinner years before and sat next to Edmund Bacon, Philadelphia’s powerful postwar urban planner and one of the designers of Love Park. At dinner, Bacon was lamenting the city’s treatment of skaters, who had found such an excellent use for the space, only to have it criminalized. (At 92, Bacon famously protested the city’s ban on skateboarding by riding a board a short distance across the plaza.) Allen liked the idea of sending some of the remnants to Sweden. Josh Nims, the head of Skate Philly at the time, liked the idea, too: It would send a message to the city that this plaza really was that important to people all over the world.
Eden was already planning travel to the United States, so he added a stop in Philadelphia, where he paid a visit to the storage lot with Allen and Nims. Allen watched with fascination as Eden stopped in front of one of the granite slabs and said that it was the most famous ledge in the plaza. It was indistinguishable to Allen from all the others. “I was just amazed that somebody from Sweden knew all this about Love Park,” Allen says, “and about these individual stones.”
Skate Philly didn’t want Eden to take anything that had been skated, and Eden had no interest in asking. Everyone agreed that these were too precious and that they belonged in Philly. But because many of the ledges at Love were rectangular planter boxes situated at the edge of the plaza, there were identical pieces of granite from the street-facing side that had never been touched. Eden was offered six of those pieces. He managed to fit them — plus around 100 floor tiles, two trash cans and the lamppost — into a shipping container, which then crossed the Atlantic and was unloaded into another municipal storage lot in Malmo, where it would sit while Eden began the process of finding a place to build.
That process would wind up taking seven years, and during that time, some of the imported Love material was stolen or went missing. Five of the lamppost’s six arms were sawed off, presumably for scrap. Eden had the missing arms refabricated based on measurements from the one remaining. The ledges disappeared, too. And some of the pavers cracked while in storage. When Eden finally found a place to build, he didn’t have enough of them to cover the entire space, so Swedish granite was cut and polished with diamond sheets to match the Philadelphia material.
That morning, as we stood on the platform, Eden directed my attention to some paver tiles threaded with veins of golden lacquer. They were broken, but he’d had them sutured back together in the style of Japanese kintsugi, the practice of saving fractured pottery and honoring the breakage as part of the vessel’s life. “Some people might think it’s cheesy, but it tells a story,” Eden said. “This has a history and it’s worth keeping.”
Later that day, Eden took me around Malmo, showing me the wide array of city-built spots. Some were elaborate: a star-shaped skateable sculpture by the Korean artist Koo Jeong A; an expansive area with a dizzying variety of low-impact obstacles at the foot of an old shipway called Stapelbaddsparken; a bowl-slash-ball-court built for children at an elementary school in the Rosengard district. But many of the most enticing spots, to me anyway, were nothing more than simple granite benches, about 14 inches tall, placed in areas with nice smooth ground and ample space at either end — both to give skaters room to approach and ride away, but also to keep clear sightlines for Malmo’s many cyclists and other innocents. Eden told me the benches cost the city about $1,000 apiece. It takes a skateboarder to know that you don’t need a big, expensive park to make skaters happy.
Eden has a theory about why Sweden is so much kinder to skateboarders. In the United States, a whole industry of private security exists to behave as though anyone who gets injured anywhere will sue the owner of the property for everything. But Sweden is not the sort of place, he believes, where security guards are quite so inclined to defend a plaza from teenagers at play. “Sweden has one of the lowest authority distances in the world,” Eden says. “The king is just a dude.” And more practically, there is universal health care, which lessens the financial risk of injury to all parties.
Beyond that, Sweden has a society thick — or, anyway, thicker than ours — with taxpayer-subsidized associations. Malmo has a powerful skateboarding association called Bryggeriet, or “Brewery,” named after the abandoned industrial building where the group runs an indoor park and, above it, a high school with a skateboarding curriculum. It was the work between Bryggeriet and the city, planning youth events, that led to the creation of Eden’s job. “The city of Malmo didn’t just decide to invest in skateboarding one day,” Eden says. “This is a collaboration that has grown over 25 years, step by step.”
To remake Love authentically, Eden felt that he needed to put it right in the middle of town, just as it was in Philly. “We can’t, like, put this in a field and sell tickets to go, or put this into a skate park,” he said. “This has to be inviting skateboarders into the city.” Eden also took care to get the measurements exactly right. Before the plaza was destroyed, a Philadelphia-based skate filmer named Brian Panebianco had measured every ledge in the place. Things settle and shift, and Panebianco wanted any future rebuild to be accurate to the real plaza, not just to the renderings. Eden took the figures on the blueprints and Panebianco’s numbers and made an average of them, building each ledge about 17 inches tall.
The ledges I skate in Brooklyn are probably around 15 inches tall. That may not sound like a big difference, but you must understand that ledge height, for the aging skater, is effectively logarithmic; each additional inch past, let’s say, 14 makes a ledge twice as hard to skate. All the additional effort you put into ollieing higher takes away from your ability to place your board and weight exactly as you want it — and grinding or sliding on a ledge properly is all about this placement, because once you’re up there, you’re at the mercy of gravity, friction and chance.
Going into the trip, it was all I could think about: 17 inches. And once I managed to get up there, what surprised me was how the granite felt through the board. Every substance has a different feel and sound when you grind or slide on it. Plastic is almost silent and provides too little resistance; concrete is the opposite — it fights back and constantly needs wax. Granite is in the Goldilocks Zone between these two. I had expected the ledges at Love to give a bit of feedback through the feet, to let me know where my trucks were, if they were locked in, if I was going to be OK — but they didn’t. They were as frictionless as the plastic benches I used to skate in Southern California, and slicker when waxed, but harder — butter straight out of the freezer. Frictionlessness may sound like a gift, but it isn’t always.
When a 39-year-old magazine editor attempts to ollie a foot and a half into the air and do a 5-0 grind, placing only his back truck onto the edge of a piece of waxed granite while traveling at, let’s say, a jogging pace, a lot can go wrong that wouldn’t go wrong if the ledge were just 15 inches tall. For example, if he overshoots and gets both rear wheels on top of the ledge because he’s moved his weight too far back as he strains to get up, what can happen — hypothetically — is that, with all his weight on the back of the board and toward his heels, the rear wheels lose all traction on the ledge and the board slips out from under him, sending his 39-year-old ass rather theatrically to the ground in front of a bunch of young Swedish skaters, one of whom asks if he’s OK, and says something along the lines of, “That sounded heavy.”
Because this is all hypothetical, you can trust me when I say that if that had happened, it would have been at least in part a byproduct of Love Malmo’s faithful design. At the original plaza, the pavers were made to “float” above the ground below, to allow for drainage and the freeze-thaw cycle. When Eden got the granite, he suspended the tile too. “The experience of skateboarding is embodied through the senses,” Eden told me. “So we needed the sound to be right.”
And it was the ground at Love Malmo that delighted me the most. Thanks to the hollow beneath, it was loud, responsive, almost springy — alive in a way the ground rarely feels. And just the right amount of smooth, enough to make your wheels squeak back to correct an off-center landing, but not so much that they lose purchase. This little squeak is, I would venture to say, one of the best feelings in skateboarding: your board obeying the momentum of your body; total dominance over the entropy and chaos that so often thwart you.
Whenever I neglect my board for too long, it is these simple tactile pleasures that bring me back. They can be easy to forget when you’re on life’s downslope. Skateboarding is so much about visualization, and as you age and decline, this can become frustrating, as your mind is now cluttered with embodied memories of your past self that you can no longer access. Perhaps this is just what it means to get older. You are yourself, and not; you have, one by one, deleted every cell constituting the guy who could do backside tailslides and replaced them with new ones.
But if you get too hung up on that, you can lose sight of what brought you to it in the first place: what it feels like to be on your board, flying down the street. You’re about two inches in the air, gliding just above the pavement, enveloped in a cocoon of sound; you feel this sound, too, up through your legs. And you can silence it all with a crack of the tail and slide of the foot, just for an instant, before your wheels find the ground and its vibrations flow through you once more. I’ve yet to find a feeling that compares.
Skateboarding mythology has warned against the sort of ancestor worship that Love Malmo could be said to represent. There’s an iconic video from the ’80s called “The Search for Animal Chin” — one of the few skate videos to have a plot (and for good reason) — in which a group of skaters goes looking for the fictional inventor of skateboarding, a guy named (I regret to say) Won Ton “Animal” Chin. Of course, they never find him, and at the end, a voice-over informs the viewer that Animal Chin was actually a metaphor, or something. The real Animal Chin — that is, the real source of this thing we love — is having fun on your board. “And as long as skaters keep searching for Chin,” the narrator says, “they’ve already found him.” This is stupid and corny, but it nevertheless captures something true. Skateboarding is a culture that is constantly recreating itself, so authenticity resides not in its origins, only in its practice.
I was thinking about this on my last night in Malmo, as I had a few beers with Eden at a cafe. I wanted to bring up an awkward subject I had been meaning to discuss: that the ledges he installed, the centerpiece of the whole project, were not actually from Love Park. The Philly skaters had told me about it, but Eden had not brought it up. “There are no secrets,” he said, and began to explain. It took so long to find a spot suitable for the granite. When he finally got approval, he went with the contractors to the city lot where his Love ledges were stored. All sorts of granite had been kept at the lot over the years for different city projects — and all of it was gone. He learned that some of the stone had been sent off to a rock crusher, so he hurried over there. Nothing. No one knew where it went, nor has anyone figured it out since. The sacred stones from Philadelphia might now be lining some footpath in Malmo.
Eden was miserable. He’d been entrusted with something invaluable, and it was gone. “The whole project felt like it was over,” he said, “and I didn’t know what to do.”
But he knew from talking to Love locals that the pavers occasionally broke and were replaced. So he contacted Bob Allen in Philadelphia, who had parks department preservationists dig through the city archives. The material turned out to be something called White Mount Airy granite, from North Carolina, a bright white stone that has been used for monuments in Washington and New York. Eden contacted the quarry and ordered new stones cut to match. They even promised him, because he asked, that they would cut it from the same part of the quarry. Panebianco, the filmer from Philly, came to Malmo right before the spot opened and took an angle grinder to the granite to help break it in. “He really went to town on it,” Eden said. Panebianco was preparing it for a group of Philly guys who had come with him, whom Eden had invited to skate the ledges first — and, in some sense, to anoint them.
Coming into the trip, I worried that this knowledge would diminish the magic of the place somehow. But the sheer amount of effort Eden put in to perfecting something that is, to the outside world, so inconsequential — the feel of four ledges in the third-biggest city in Sweden — quieted that thought. I had also gotten to know the Love locals over my days there, and I asked a couple of them if they knew about the ledges. They did, and didn’t mind at all. And why should they? They were great ledges; they felt like butter, and they were right in the middle of town. You can meet people from all over the world there — New Zealand, Canada, Argentina, Spain, Germany, France, England — connected only by a recondite subculture that still reveres a now-nonexistent plaza in an American city. Or at least appreciates good granite.
One Friday evening, as the session at Love was winding down, a boy came through who couldn’t have been older than 6, wearing a helmet, elbow pads and kneepads. His T-shirt bore the silhouette of the Kockums Crane, a 450-foot structure at the shipyards that once defined the Malmo skyline but had been, like Love Park, relocated for unhappy reasons. Amid a steep decline in Swedish shipbuilding, the crane was acquired in 2002 by Hyundai and moved to Ulsan, South Korea, where it has been given the nickname Tears of Malmo.
It seems doubtful the 6-year-old appreciated the resonance — though, to be fair, I didn’t ask. He moved with confidence on his board, hurling himself off the side of the platform with the sort of fearlessness only small children possess. Watching him tic-tac up and down the granite pavers, so numinous with meaning to guys my age, it occurred to me that none of it really mattered. The shirt, he would outgrow within a year. He would ditch the pads and helmet in a few more, if he stuck with it. By the time he’d be old enough to care, any locals who grew up watching Love footage would be well on their way to collecting generous Swedish pensions.
But the sidewalk improvement would remain. And to this boy, perhaps, it will be the place in the middle of his hometown where he learned how to skate, on its unusually perfect granite.
The post The Ultimate Pilgrimage for the Middle-Aged Skateboarder appeared first on New York Times.
