Searching for a Skateboard Haven in Hempstead

“Blake is my son- a twin, with a twin brother- and he went across the country to follow his dreams of skateboarding,” said Natalie Bethea.

Blake Gray left for California four years ago from Hempstead, where skate parks are miles apart. The Village of Hempstead does not have a skate park. The opportunity to become a professional skateboarder was nonexistent for Gray, as is the same for skateboarders today who are left to jump over milk cartons stacked in vacant parking lots.

“Blake was always the nontraditional kid,” Bethea remembered. He would bring classmates home from school to teach them how to ride and challenged them to do better. Bethea said that she raised her kids to be open-minded and they celebrated every holiday. Gray comes from a line of teachers but Bethea said that her son “is a teacher in a different right.”

He played other sports that were popular in Hempstead but he drifted to skateboarding because it was unpopular. He said that people probably watched him thinking, “Look at this idiot skateboarding down Jerusalem Avenue.” Gray and his small cohort would take on the night on four wheels. “We were only five people skateboarding in Hempstead at the time,” he said about the group of friends that stuck with him as they passed into a stereotypically white pastime.

Gray is African American. The skateboard nudged under his arm was a point of contention as he walked around his middle school. He was teased: white boy.

Heidi Lemmon, the executive director of the Skate Park Association of the U.S.A, said that in her visit to Hempstead, she noticed an isolated African American community. “They would take an attitude that this is a white kid’s sport and they would prefer a basketball or baseball player but basketball and baseball were once white,” Lemmon said.

According to “Spots of Spacial Desire,” a report in 2009 on skate parks, skate plazas, and urban politics, skateboarding is a “generally white, male, upper-middle class enterprise” and it “reproduces social inequalities that perpetuate contemporary race, class, and gender privileges.”

Bethea said that skateboarding does not have nationality, class, race, or economic bias because it does not cost much. The average cost of a skateboard is between $50 and $70 but indeed, the need for a skateboarding haven in Hempstead has caused skaters a price.

15-year old Andrew Darnell, a young skateboarder jumping over a makeshift skateboard ramp in Hempstead.

Gray was the oldest of his crew and took responsibility for them, picking the places they would skate and how they would get there. “At the gas station on Uniondale Ave, all the kids would throw down,” he said. “It was pretty crazy having to travel around. There were all these variables.” Gray said that someone who drank too much could take a swing at them and they would have little protection. “It made you a target because you didn’t have the strength in numbers,” he said. Bethea said that “it was a horror” every time her son left the house because he was chased out of everywhere he skated. There was no legal place for them to skate. “They have to go so far from home to do something they love,” she said.

Many of the skaters are young and cannot afford to travel. Baldwin Skate Park is five miles away from Hempstead Village. The 11,000 square-foot park is divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced sections. Liz Rosario of Parks and Recreation of Hempstead Village said that skateboarding is a camaraderie sport where the old and young prefer to work together. The entrance fee is three dollars for town residents and nine dollars for non-town residents with the purchase of a ten dollar ID. In these private parks, skaters must wear protective gear. In Nassau County, a skater or their guardian can be fined $50 if they forfeit a helmet.

Darnell is studying his fellow skaters while they practice. He wants to go pro.

The Town of North Hempstead opened North Hempstead’s Skate Spot in 2011. It is a 10,000 square foot park without an entrance fee. It is 12 miles from Hempstead Village, making it a trek for skaters.

Without a skate park, skaters used infrastructure as a playground: sidewalks, handrails, benches, curbs and the list goes on. “Spots of Spatial Desire” reported that private skate parks used to survive on membership fees but there were  many trespassers and the skate park enterprise experienced a bankruptcy around the 1980’s because members left and insurance premiums went up. Grinding on handrails instead, skaters were hit with charges for damaging public property.

With what Bethea described as a “negative stigma” towards skateboarders, skate parks are often viewed as drug trafficking hot-spots and an invitation to the delinquent. In 1990 in Portland, Oregon, a group of skaters built a structure under the Burnside Bridge, notorious for social misfits, including the homeless and prostitutes. The collaboration of the homeless giving the skaters random debris to build in a public space was, of course, illegal.

Lemmon said that skaters are perceived as “throw-away kids.” Heavy metal icon Rob Zombie reportedly wanted these kids off of his lawn in Woodbury, Connecticut. His wife called the Hollow Park Skate Park by their home a “noise pollutant” at the Litchfield County budget meeting. The noise escalates in a skateboarding crowd when tricks are landed but also when they flop.

Alex Dumas of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa and Sophie Laforest of the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Montreal looked into the medical aspect of skating on the streets versus a skate park. They said that “the streets represent the most common location for injuries.” They suggested that skate parks would be safer because of regulations and monitoring. In a 35-day study with 422 registered skaters in 11 parks in Montreal, they found that less than one percent sustained injuries that needed medical attention. They also noticed that the skaters often evaluated their physical limits and built new skills around them.

According to the Journal of Trauma in 2002 by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, skateboarding had an injury rate of 8.9 per 1,000 participants and basketball produced 21.2 ER-treated injuries per 1,000 players. Lemmon said that skating held the same liability as figure skating.

Figure skating is done on ice and ice for skaters is a problem. “The hardest part is you get six to eight months of good skateboard time,” Gray said about skating in Hempstead. He said he could continue to wake up at 7 a.m. to skate every day, “And progress, where?” He questioned. “The numbers aren’t big enough in Hempstead,” he said. Gray said that skating in California is at a magnitude that the East Coast has never seen. He believes a skate park is still necessary for the skateboarders out East. “It’s more so like an office,” he said.

Four years ago with the help of Lemmon, Parks and Recreation of Hempstead Village presented a proposal to Mayor Wayne J. Hall, Sr. with 250 signatures to build a skate park. Rosario said that they found three parks large enough to facilitate a decent-sized skate park. It costs $40 per square foot to build a skate park and 20,000 square feet is a fair size, according to Lemmon. They were refused. “I could think of 10,000 other kids they could be afraid of,” Rosario said.

Lemmon said that the mayor did not receive their message well. “With all the problems with kids, when a city has a lot of rambunctious males, council members should be jumping for joy to build something,” she said. She said Mayor Hall attended a skating event they had in a school gym and he was upset that they were there. He allocated funds to upgrading all of the baseball fields in Hempstead Village.

Gray was restless without his haven. Bethea remembers when he said to her, “Ma, I have to do this.” She said, “I often equate it to a young lady who wants to go to Hollywood to be an actress.” She gave him $121 for a ticket to California.

“You want to sacrifice your all just to skateboard,” Gray said. In California he started teaching skaters and taking them to competitions. He was noticed. He coaches skaters as a brand ambassador for NIKE now at 25.

He will always remember taking his chances winding through the traffic on his skateboard, a minority in the taboo sport of Hempstead. “When I’m on the streets, the streets become small,” he said. “I’m Godzilla.”

Blake Gray in the air.