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As the exchanges got testier, skaters began migrating to other spots, such as a row of stairs with steep bannisters that connected the Embarcadero to the city's downtown corridor. Built as a pedestrian walkway, it became a hangout for homeless people, skaters, and bike messengers; according to Watson. The stairs' nickname, "Hubba Hideout," originated from the crack that some vagrants would smoke there. "We called the rocks 'hubbas,'" he explains, adding that ''hubba" ultimately became skate-slang for any ledge that ran alongside a row of stairs.
Skaters also moved over to Pier 7, a low, two-step platform with squat benches, which lent itself to a grittier skating style. Since the obstacles weren't nearly as intricate, skaters focused on manual tricks like balancing on the nose or tail of the board, scraping their wheels along the ledges, and leaving scrub marks on the concrete. Then the police encroached on that spot, too, pushing the skaters to yet another part of the city — a pedestrian overpass at Third and Army streets, flanked by a Muni bus yard and a creek clotted with garbage and wood pilings. Thus far, it's the only place remote enough to stave off law enforcement, Thompson says.
Nonetheless, the cat-and-mouse game persisted, and skateboarders soon found themselves banished from anywhere the city was interested in filling with tourists or new development. They had little choice but to move. Skateboarding had been illegal since the 1970s, per an often-overlooked section of the municipal traffic code. But during the skateboard renaissance of the '90s, police began bullishly enforcing it. As San Francisco started transforming in the wake of the first dot-com boom, real estate developers conceived a new urban design that would keep skateboards out. Instead, they'd be shunted to fenced-in facilities that Watson compares to "reservations," or to industrial zones on the periphery of the city. Those iconic spots that dotted the Embarcadero would quietly disappear.
Union Square, with its zig-zag bannisters, ridged granite steps, and strategically placed flower beds, is an artfully designed bulwark against skateboards. Most of these architectural features were introduced during a $25 million remodel in 2000, right at the end of the dot-com boom. Downtown merchants were coalescing to form business-improvement districts, which in turn would fund street-cleaning and landscape improvements; then-Mayor Willie Brown had a European vision for the city, with a piazza as its centerpiece.
That vision didn't include San Francisco's less-desirable elements. Rails in the middle of benches served the dual purpose of inhibiting skaters and preventing homeless people from lying there; wood installed on the seating area of Pier 7 constituted a similarly effective barrier. Cobblestones were laid on the band shell at Golden Gate Park, which was once a prime skate spot; metal edges were nailed to the concrete embankments of Embarcadero. The city screwed studs into the bannisters at Hubba Hideout and laid gravel at the ends of its staircases. In 2011, it ripped out the ledges.
To an increasing degree, San Francisco's animus toward skaters became embedded in its architecture.
Meanwhile, the ongoing spats between cops and skaters had become a political issue in City Hall. By 1997, skaters had formed their own political bloc, enlisting then-Supervisor Tom Ammiano to override the 1976 law banning skateboards from public roadways. That campaign ultimately failed, but it did pique the interest of Supervisor Gavin Newsom, who decided to create a citywide Skateboarding Task Force in 2002. The idea was to help city officials design new skate parks and push for legislative changes, in the hope that skaters, cops, and pedestrians could one day coexist peacefully.
In 2005, skaters and their City Hall allies managed to repeal a small section of the 1976 law that barred skateboards from Terra Vista Avenue; otherwise it remained largely intact. But then a 2007 charter amendment shifted transportation authority from the Board of Supervisors to the SFMTA, at which point seven years of task-forcing were essentially rendered moot. Now, it's illegal to ride a skateboard on any street or sidewalk within a business district, or on any residential sidewalk during the day. The last change, ratified in 2008, forbids skateboarding on MTA platforms.
But even as the city banished skaters from their former haunts, it spent millions to construct six skate parks in the past 14 years. Bryan Hornbeck, who heads the San Francisco Skateboarding Association (an offshoot of the aborted task force), sees these city-designated skate parks as the only solution to the cat-and-mouse game.
"My thing is that, if 8- or 9-year-old kids start skating in the parks, they're not going to be out on the street as much, they're not going to be accosted as much, they're not going to come across homeless people as much," Hornbeck says. "These things are going to save lives."
But even after he got the city on board, Hornbeck says he faced staunch opposition from homeowners who insist that the parks bring noise and graffiti into their neighborhoods. "They go to these city meetings and bitch and complain, and then I bitch and complain about their bitching and complaining," he says. "And then the city has to overcome the bitching and complaining, so that's how they [decide] what gets done."
The sound of polyurethane wheels grinding over concrete creates a stark, percussive harmony with the cars whooshing overhead at Duboce and Mission Streets on an otherwise quiet Sunday night. Two lone skaters are circling the ramps and pillars of SOMA West skate park, which opened on a patch of ground beneath Highway 101 in July. A large bowl in the center is dappled by headlights and the waxen beams of street lamps. Except for a couple of homeless guys leaning against the fence with a shopping cart, the adjacent streets are empty.
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