Josh McLaughlin skates at the Civic Center, Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2023.Charles Russo/SFGATE
By Lester Black Dec 2, 2023 (SFGate.com)
U.N. Plaza has long been known as a blight in the center of San Francisco, home to drug dealing and a market for stolen goods that’s just steps away from City Hall. It has become another symbol of the “failed city” narrative that often plagues SF, so I was a bit skeptical about the city’s plan to revive it with a new skate plaza built above the Civic Center BART stop.
Earlier this year, the city spent $2 million building a new public space with workout equipment, pingpong tables and, at its centerpiece, a network of skateboarding features that are blended into the environment.
As a lifelong skateboarder and San Francisco resident, I decided to check it out myself. Not only did I enjoy it, it turns out the entire city’s skateboard community seems to have fallen in love with the city’s newest park.
“It’s a dream to be able to skate stuff like this,” said Josh McLaughlin, a local skateboarder who spoke after successfully landing a 40-foot-long boardslide across a concrete curb in the center of the plaza.
U.N. Plaza doesn’t look like a conventional skatepark — there are no half pipes or deep bowls for skateboarding — but that’s because the city opted for a design known as a “skate plaza,” where the skateable features look like the same street curbs, concrete benches and brick walkways that line any normal street. But these benches and curbs have been specifically designed for skateboarding, making it easier to skate them.
I took advantage of these pristine features as I rode a faux brick embankment stamped with the outlines of bricks that borders Market Street. In the real world, I would never be able to handle skating on the rough uneven edges of a brick embankment. But with the plaza’s design, I was able to feel the awesome chatter of “bricks” under my wheels as I rode up and over a concrete ledge.
The park is less than a month old, but it’s already the most popular place for skateboarders in the city, according to JP Escobar, a local skateboarder.
“Everyone is coming here every day,” Escobar said. “The whole skate scene comes here. It’s hella popular.”
San Francisco has an internationally recognized skate scene: Its steep hills have played a starring role in countless skate videos since the 1980s and it’s the headquarters for the trendsetting magazine Thrasher. Yet despite San Francisco’s iconic status in the global skate scene, the city has historically pushed skateboarders to its edges. The city’s two largest skateparks border busy freeways, and when skateboarders gathered for an annual event near Dolores Park earlier this year, police ended up arresting more than 100 people, including 81 juveniles.
The U.N. Skate Plaza is a step toward changing that relationship, giving skaters a sort of town square next to one of the busiest metro stations on the West Coast.
“It’s central to the city so it’s easy for everybody to get to one spot,” McLaughlin told me. “That’s part of the fun, you meet up here and it’ll take you everywhere else. If it’s too crowded here, we’ll jump on BART and head to Oakland or somewhere else.”
The city is hoping that bringing hundreds of skateboarders to Civic Center will help reduce the amount of street violence and drug use that occurs in the area, and I saw that play out firsthand on my recent visit. Two people had sat down on one of the plaza’s benches and pulled out pipes to smoke some type of drug, only to have a skateboarder immediately run over to them, take his shirt off, and tell them they needed to leave. After a few minutes of back and forth, the two people left the bench and the skateboarding resumed.
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The skateboarder who evicted the two people later told me that the area is still dangerous, adding that he’s seen bags get stolen and people pass out from drug overdoses. Also, the city has yet to install trash cans, which could make the area cleaner.
“How are we supposed to clean it up if they don’t have any trash cans?” said the skateboarder, who referred to himself as Space.
I reached out to San Francisco Public Works to see if the department plans on installing trash cans but I did not hear back by press time.
Escobar described the area as “still f—ked up, but at least a little better.” He laughed when I asked if he thought skateboarders could fix everything wrong with the area.
“Are skateboarders able to save the city? I’m not sure, but one step at a time,” Escobar said with a laugh.
Dec 2, 2023
By Lester Black
Lester Black is SFGATE’s contributing cannabis editor. He was born in Torrance, raised in Seattle, and has written for FiveThirtyEight.com, High Country News, The Guardian, The Albuquerque Journal, The Tennessean, and many other publications. He was previously the cannabis columnist for The Stranger.
