New York City has a lot of nicknames:The City That Never Sleeps, The Big Apple, and The Empire City are just a few. But how about The World’s Biggest Skate Park? Unknowingly, the city and its designers have contributed enormously to the development of skateboarding and skater culture since the 1970s. “Deathbowl to Downtown,” a new movie which was screened last Friday at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), argues that building practices adopted in the 1960s inadvertently helped spark the explosion in skateboarding culture that has occurred over the last 30 years.

In 1961, New York City adopted new building regulations designed to encourage more modern architecture and create more privately-owned public space. As part of this effort, the city offered extra floorspace in return for the inclusion of plazas and arcades in building plans. This “inventive zoning” offered huge economic benefits to developers. Professor Jerold Kayden of the GSD has studied these effects and is featured in “Deathbowl to Downtown.”

“Because it was a very good economic deal for the developers throughout the 1960s, they almost uniformly provided plazas,” Kayden says. However, he adds that the regulations demanded little of developers. “You could basically slap down some terrazzo in front of your building and collect your 10-to-1 floor area bonus.”

By the mid-70s, these new building practices had left a multitude of pointless, unattractive public spaces littered around the city. It was just at this time that a new underground culture was beginning to break out. Skateboarding had begun in California in the 1950s as people skated in unused swimming pools before spilling out onto skating ramps and the streets. However, the movie argues that, by the late-70s, “skateboarding seemed ripe for the museum of failed fads.” What saved it was street skating in cities.

“Recognizing that it could happen anywhere and on everything, that’s what saved skateboarding,” Rick Charnoski says. Charnoski co-directed “Deathbowl to Downtown” alongside Coan “Buddy” Nichols.

“If skating was about going out your door and skating whatever’s in front of you, you could turn on 10 times more kids than having just a ramp,” Nichols says.

The spirit of adventure that characterized the pioneers of street-skating found its perfect home in the new plazas that were being added on to building projects all across the city.

“It is completely natural that skaters would move into these areas,” Kayden says. “They are public spaces, they have the various steps and ledges and railings that skaters obviously appreciate. They became the playground.”

“It was like skaters had a mole in the city planning office,” narrator Chloë Sevigny says, describing how skaters adopted these spaces as their own. “Deathbowl” is full of homemade footage of skaters finding inventive ways to use the plazas of New York, whether by grinding rails or performing ollies on ledges. One particularly impressive scene sees a former skater jump over 5 garbage cans in Washington Square Park to land on another skateboard, 15 years after he last performed the trick.

Nichols and Charnoski frequently talk about skateboarding as “liberating unused space.” They are also clearly amused by the unintended results of design practices and, as Nichols says, how “little kids figure out an alternative use for all these things built for adults.” They see the interaction between a city and its youth as a vital part of skateboarding.

“[Skateboarding] is so accessible; it’s interesting, it’s fun, you’re travelling. You get out of your neighbourhood as a skater. You have a reason to go 5 miles away,” Nichols says.

This interaction between the built environment and skaters is not limited to New York, however. Boston has its own skating hotspots: Nichols and Charnoski point out the Government Center T Station and one disused swimming pool close to Harvard—whose exact location they refuse to reveal so as not to attract attention to the spot—as popular places for skaters to test out their skills.

By offering teenagers the opportunity to invent new tricks, the public spaces gave a lot to skateboarding, but the reverse is also true. Skaters helped give life to places that previously had none, and which, without skating, may never really have served any purpose.

“There are many plazas in New York City that are inhospitable to all but the adventurous,” Kayden says. “The idea that skateboarders would use those spaces to me is a vindication of the human spirit and a wonderful thing to have happened to spaces that were so unappealing to people that they never should have been built in the first place.” Thankfully for skateboarding, they were built and have been transformed from bland plazas into The Skate Park That Never Sleeps.

—Crimson staff writer Chris R. Kingston can be reached at kingston@fas.harvard.