Skateboarding
The City of Brotherly Love made the names of Getz, Williams, Kalis and Oyola. Meet the next generation as Jahmir Brown and friends show us around their new playgrounds in Greetings From Philadelphia.
Skating in Philadelphia is hard. Rugged terrain, uneven sidewalks, and every weather condition imaginable is hurled at skaters whose goal is to thrash the City of Brotherly Love. “The streets are rough. The spots are rough. There’s a lot you’ve got to battle,” says Kerry Getz, owner of iconic Philly skate shop, Nocturnal. But adversity breeds creativity, and that’s what Greetings From Philadelphia demonstrates, watch it above.
Ask someone to describe Philly and there’s a good chance 'gritty' will come up in the description. Hell, you might hear about Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers’ – and, by extension – the town’s mascot.
“It builds character, it makes you tough. It’s just that gritty, raw energy. The skateboarding scene is lit up.” says Jahmir Brown, a Philadelphia native. “The legacy is very huge, and iconic, but now it’s our scene. And we’re doing what we want to do.”
In the 1980s, at any given moment you could find dozens, if not hundreds of skateboarders rolling around John F. Kennedy Plaza’s Love Park at Fifteenth Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard in Center City. The scene was booming. So much so, that local authorities felt the need to crack down. Two separate bans, in 1994 and 2000, led to tensions between Philadelphia skateboarders and local law enforcement.
Bitter struggles for their own space led to the city agreeing to contribute sixteen thousand square feet of unused public land beneath the interstate of South Philly’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park – becoming today’s FDR Skatepark. Thanks to a further relaxation in attitudes towards skating, Muni Park is now skateable, something unheard of in the ’90s.
Thanks to the fight of Philadelphia’s skateboarders, the city’s scene lives and thrives to this day. It’s a vibrant, diverse, passionate culture that reflects the city it grew from.
“There’s a lot of people that are Philadelphia skateboarders that are not from here. There’s a lot of Philadelphia skateboarders that were born and raised here,” says Brown. “And no matter what, there’s love for everyone. But when you from here, we like to claim it a little harder: ‘Nah, I’m FROM Philly.’”
Hear from Kerry Getz, Josh Kalis, and the new wave of Philly's skate scene by clicking on the player above, as they send the world Greetings From Philadelphia!
