Boarder wars

Newport cracks down on skateboarders in Perrotti Park

by David Andrew Stoler

The latest Nike ad campaign portrays the police breaking up a golf game. "What are you doing here?" the police ask the golfers.

"Nothin'," the golfers respond.

"Whose clubs are those?" the police ask.

"Dunno," say the golfers. "Found 'em here."

Police, taking the clubs away from the golfers: "The city didn't build this place so you could come in here with your golf clubs and ruin it."

The ad cuts to a skateboarder flying across a blue-sky background. "What if we treated all athletes the way we treat skateboarders?" the ad asks.

Of course, then the ad cuts to Nike's ubiquitous swoosh, and it becomes apparent that the irony implied by the question is brought to us only as Nike's attempt to co-opt one of the last sports it has yet to monopolize. Regardless of Nike's simple and unwavering motives, the question is still a good one. Why is it that skateboarders are, across the board, treated like second-class citizens?

On August 13, in an unanimous decision, the City Council of Newport banned skateboarders from Perrotti Park, a small strip of '70s renovation on America's Cup Avenue near Long Wharf. Now Newport, if you've missed it, has pretty much proven its poo-bahs to be pooh-poohs this summer by basically declaring war on anyone who thought they might have a good time within the city's borders. But nothing Newport officials did provoked near the public response, both supporting and protesting, as the Perrotti Park ban.

Supporters of the ban say the skateboarding kids prevent people from using the park. The kids are loud. They curse. And most important, they are a danger to themselves, the park, and anyone who happens to be near either. The kids say they have nowhere else to go.

Both sides are, in fact, right. According to one City Council member, the skateboarders have already caused injury to one passerby, and the park is getting pretty beat up. On the other hand, although the ban came with a proviso saying that the city would build another park specifically to accommodate the ousted skaters, that park, at this point, is nothing more than political fanfare -- just some petty cash and a few proposed sites and subcommittees.

And while the skateboarders wait on promises of a new park, the council made no attempt to find an interim compromise at Perrotti -- i.e., designated skateboarding hours. Indeed, council members made no attempt to even talk to the skaters before sending the ban well on its way to implementation.

Park n 1: an enclosed piece of ground stocked with game and held by royal prescription or grant 2: a piece of ground in or near a city or town kept for ornament or recreation

-- Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary

Chris Ginty, a shy 13-year old from Newport, considers Perrotti Park, which connects the Long Wharf shopping area with the rest of downtown Newport, a lucky jewel for area skateboarders. "It has curbs the right height, benches, and gaps," he says, describing with his hand the motion a skateboard might make over each coincident obstacle. Although the park, built during the America's Cup renovation of the late 1970s, was originally designed simply as a park, it does, in fact, lend itself ideally to a sport that blossomed after its creation.

The beauty of skateboarding is that it needs no court, field, or tennis-club membership, and Perrotti's wide concrete sidewalks lined with smooth wooden benches and long, low walls that curve and slope around the entire area are perfect for jumping over and off of and grinding across.

When the Extreme and X Games came and turned Newport into a skateboarding town in '95 and '96, the popularity of Perrotti's walls increased. The park became the place to hang out, "congregate, and skate," Ginty says. Skateboarders, up to 30 or so of them, could always be found laughing, making noise -- essentially being kids and enjoying Perrotti.

No problem so far, except that a few other things happened with the increase in skater traffic, things that made some people less than pleased with the park's new clientele. First, fewer people are using the park now for things other than skating. David Leys, head of the Long Wharf Mall Association, says that "there are so many of [the skaters] that a person wouldn't just go in there and sit down and watch the harbor. Instead, they walk around on the sidewalk."

Leys says that another problem with all of the skaters in the park is the strain all of that bumping and grinding puts on the park itself. "The benches are all torn up, the sidewalk is scratched up, and there's graffiti," says Leys. "They're ruining the park."

While a pretty thorough inspection reveals that the park hasn't been brought down quite to the level of, say, the stonewall surrounding the honorable and esteemed Che Cianci's house, a fair amount of damage has indeed been done. Almost all of the walls and benches in the park are marked up, and some of the benches are pretty splintered. And Leys is right on about the graffiti -- it covers the park's concrete walks.

Although these reasons are good enough for taking some action against the boarders, it does not take much prodding to get Leys to reveal the other issue behind the anti-skateboarding crusade. The park "was built for people to enjoy," Leys says. "For some reason, the skateboarders think they built it for skateboarding, and it just so happens the layout lends itself to their type of thing . . . They just don't belong there."

"And who does `belong' there?" I ask Leys.

"Appropriate park activity is walking, enjoying the sights, whatever they might be, and not being intimidated by anyone," he says.

Leys's penchant for proclaiming who belongs where and who doesn't aside, there is an underlying feeling that is hard to argue against: some people are just plain scared by a loud group of kids making noise and flying around on skateboards. With their baseball caps, baggy shorts, and body piercings, the Newport skaters also look different, and they hang out in groups, prompting a generational knee-jerk response that says they're delinquents.

Indeed, while Leys says that people are frightened that by going into the park, they are putting themselves in physical danger, most of the evidence for the skateboarders' threat to public safety is anecdotal.

"Do you know of any actual problems between skateboarders and other park users?" I ask Leys.

"I haven't had any direct complaints," he says, "but I'm sure there have been. Some of [the skateboarders] are very arrogant."

And apparently, this was enough for Leys, who sent a letter to the City Council asking for the ban. "Something had to be done," he says, "and I did it."

Constituency n 1b: the residents in an electoral district

-- ibid

It is, right now, a clear and warm afternoon, perfect summer weather, and in the back of Water Bros. Surf and Skate Shop at 39 Memorial Boulevard, a pack of skaters practices vert moves on a renegade half-pipe that was set up for a pro exhibition the day before and is supposed to be torn down by the end of the week. The new Tribe Called Quest CD soundtracks the afternoon from a CD player propped on the roof of a beat-up van.

At first glance, there is nothing very intimidating about these kids -- most are small, young, and really have no idea what the whole ban is about. "They banned it because people complained," Ginty says, as if the complaints were a manifestation unrelated to anything actually going on in the park.

A young boy stands at the top of the half-pipe, skateboard in hand, peering down the six-foot-tall edge, obviously frightened. "Adam, you don't have to go if you don't want to," another boy says. "But you can do it if you try."

Suddenly, the boy goes. Wide-eyed, he jumps onto his board, arms out to his sides for balance, and rides down the half-pipe's wall. The crowd surrounding the half-pipe cheers him on. Hands clap. People yell in support. When the boy starts climbing up the other side of the pipe, he doesn't attempt any of the fancy tricks the other boys have been doing. He simply turns his head in the other direction, goes the other way. He swings like a pendulum, up down up down, each time not so high, each time a bit more slowly, until his board comes almost to a rest in the center of the pipe.

The crowd of kids go crazy, cheering, yelling, "All right, Adam!" and "Great job." All of the fear has vanished from Adam's face. He's simply beaming with pride and adrenaline.

Certainly, there are troublemakers in this group, kids who swear and yell. But, today at least, they appear to be the exception. The kids here seem to be generally good kids having a good time.

Andy Corcoran, a 34-year-old inventor from Newport and a skater sympathizer, says that the kids "have this image of being crazy, but they're definitely not like that. There are definitely punks, like anything, but just a handful, and they are really being punks to the rest of the kids down there." Rather than chasing people off, the kids actually attract people to the park, Corcoran argues, because "pedestrians are watching the kids" do their thing.

Others in town agree. Ron Faybert, a 20-year-old from Cranston, works at the Gap across the street from the park. He says that he's never seen or had any trouble with the kids. "I'm not intimidated by them," he says.

John Pastore, whose son lives in Newport, uses the park all the time. "They've never bothered me," he says. "I've seen them here, doing all of their tricks, going around like crazy, but I don't care. I could see how people might be scared, though."

Indeed, although the skateboarders might not worry all of Newport's pedestrians, there are legitimate reasons to be wary of them. Skateboards are hard, first of all -- the park's damaged benches didn't come from Tickle-Me-Elmo. Also, the boards move fast. This is fine on its own, but add difficult tricks to the speed and, with no restraint system once the boarder is off the board, you've got a shin-high speeding plank of polyurethane and wood on wheels.

Ward One council member Laurice Shaw says she has taken several complaints about skateboarders and their possible infringement on other park users. Earlier this year, she says, "one of the people who lives in [Shaw's] neighborhood was walking through the park when one of the kids skateboards got away from them and just sort of slammed into the back of her legs. She, of course, fell down and got scraped up."

In a city that gets sued "for anybody who trips over the sidewalk," says Shaw, there is "an unquestionable liability issue. And for [the council] to just keep our eyes closed and say that we're not going to deal with this is pretty imprudent."

Shaw is right. Skateboarding can be dangerous, and kids can not only lose control of their boards, but they can hurt themselves as well.

"So," Shaw says, "I sponsored a resolution saying, `Let's get the kids out of there, but let's really find a place for them to skate.' " Today, Shaw says, the council is "actively looking for a site" for a new skateboard park, but there is, at this moment, no estimate of when such a place will be built.

Community n 1c: an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location.

-- ibid

What nobody really has a good answer for is why banning skateboarding is the only solution to the problem. After all, we don't simply ban everything that involves risk. Cars, for example, are legal, so are surfboards, yet people are injured because of both -- even people who are bystanders using neither.

The problem is the intimidation factor. Another of the Nike ads makes runners out to be the followers of chaos. Shot documentary-style, the ad contains footage of a non-jogger complaining about the immaturity of the runners. A woman runner jogs by in the background, crossing in front of another woman pedestrian. "Did you see that?" asks the non-jogger, shaking her head. "She almost hit that woman."

In reality, they almost hit each other, but if people perceive something in a certain way, they interpret situations to fit that perception. If you think that skateboarders are maniacs, it's not hard to feel intimidated by anything they do. If you consider your constituents or the public to be one kind of people, people like you, then it's not hard to feel as though skateboarders are getting in the way of park use.

So pedestrians -- some pedestrians, a few pedestrians -- are uncomfortable with the skateboarders, and can easily find proof to justify that discomfort. Asking the City Council to find a solution to the problem, then, was the appropriate thing to do -- that is what the council is there for, after all.

But the speed with which the council banned skateboarding in Perrotti was blistering compared to how fast Newport is moving forward now with plans for a new park or to how long it usually takes to pass most government ordinances. Although a quick-moving government in itself is no reason to complain, in this case that speed didn't seem to reflect efficiency or fairness: after receiving complaints about Perrotti, Shaw says she did not talk to a single skater before introducing her motion to ban the sport in the park.

To solve the liability issue, the council could have put up signs that said, "Skateboard at your own risk, city not liable," or "Pedestrians take heed, high skateboarding traffic." They could have, in essence, embraced the skateboarders and the vivaciousness they bring to the city -- all at much less cost than a new skateboarding park.

I ask David Leys about these ideas, pose them as alternatives to the ban, and point out that if skateboarders use the park, the park gets used. "I don't follow you," he says, and then proves it: "If you have 20 people skateboarding, nobody can use [the park]."

Rather than trying to work out a compromise between pedestrians and skateboarders (who, city officials might note, are both, in fact, members of the community for which they speak) the council simply banned skateboarding. And the skaters' only chance for rebuttal - indeed, their only opportunity to address either the issue or the council -- came the night the ban was debated and ultimately passed.

Do not doubt that a new park, in the end, would be the best solution. The kids would love it. People could walk through Perrotti without fear in their hearts. Right now, though, plans for the park remain simply polit-speak. While volunteers have signed up for subcommittees on everything from site selection to park design, there is no actual sight, no blueprints. There are also, right now, plenty of places in Newport for people to walk and look at the ocean -- the Cliff Walk, miles of beaches, the wharfs -- but an increasingly scant number of places to skate.