Brooklyn group opposes new Tony Hawk-backed skatepark: 'Pouring concrete is Stone Age'

2024-04-08T11:58:00-04:00

The city has construction plans for Mount Prospect Park, once the site of a lookout station for George Washington’s army. About 40,000 square feet of the 7.79-acre park are to be turned into one of the largest skateboarding spots on the East Coast. Some nearby residents are fighting the plan. [...] They say the poured-concrete skateboarding facility would take up precious green space in a city that does not have enough of it.

A total of four skatepark designs are scheduled to be built in the Bronx and Brooklyn, courtesy of The Skatepark Project (or TSP). Costs for a new park at the contested Brooklyn location are about $100,000.

The Mount Prospect Park location calls for 40,000 square feet worth of concrete to be poured, leading to local protests recently. Hayley Gorenberg of the group Friends of Mount Prospect Park told the Times, “Paving green space isn’t acceptable to the community, and it’s not the way for New York City to look forward to a more resilient future. It’s backwards thinking.”

Tony Hawk is also involved in Peterson Rich Office and OSD’s new adaptive reuse design for the Shepherd Gallery and Art Center in Detroit.

LA Mayor talks urbanism and mass transit with architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne

2014-02-14T18:06:00-05:00

Last night on the bucolic hilltop campus of Occidental College, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke with the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, about the state of L.A. urbanism. This broad topical platform positioned Hawthorne's interview not as a political interrogation, nor as a staged public appearance, but as a relaxed discourse for Garcetti to mention policy while riffing on the kind of place he believes L.A. is becoming. You can review Archinect's live-tweets of the event here.

The discourse of L.A. urbanism is often bogged down by insufficient comparisons and false dichotomies -- sprawl vs. density, cyclists vs. drivers, liberals vs. libertarians, east vs. west, etc. -- that doggedly try to force the region into the conventions of other, completely incomparable cities. Early on, Hawthorne made clear that "Los Angeles" has to be thought of on the "regional scale", and shouldn't copy the developmental models of radically different cities. Garcetti ce...

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Brooklyn group opposes new Tony Hawk-backed skatepark: 'Pouring concrete is Stone Age'

LA Mayor talks urbanism and mass transit with architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne