San Francisco: The city where skateboarders won? 77%
By Max Harrison-Caldwell0%
7/13/2026, 6:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 12 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Negativity Bias, and Pessimism Bias, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 36.3% saturation with 1,017 hits. Analysis detected 1,692 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,803 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 70.4% and a BS Rank of 77% (3,660 of 15,732 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 76.70% of the article peer group.
San Francisco: The city where skateboarders won?
The city has spent around $9 million on skate infrastructure in the last decade.
It’s hard to believe it used to jail people for skating on the sidewalk.
By Max Harrison-Caldwell News Reporter
Published Jul. 13, 2026 at 6:00am
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It was summer 2021 when the news surged through group chats and social media feeds: Pier 7 was back.
Within days, the waterfront plaza was choked with skaters who had come to experience the legendary spot themselves.
Before long, a dedicated Instagram account (opens in new tab) emerged.
For the first time in more than a decade, a trio of rectangular concrete pads was free of skateboarding deterrents.
It was hardly the first time skateboarders in San Francisco had removed skate stoppers — metal knobs installed on ledges and benches — but the restoration was unusually intensive.
The skaters removed the deteriorating wooden slats that had encased the pads since the late 2000s, along with most of the metal knobs that were attached before them, and used polyester resin putty to fill the holes.
The pads now serve as a palimpsest of 30 years of history.
Most remarkable is that the city never struck back.
Five years later, Pier 7 remains free (opens in new tab) .
A spokesman for the Port of San Francisco said the agency has not received complaints since skaters returned and is happy to let them remain.
It’s one indication that a city where police used to regularly harass people for the crime (opens in new tab) of skateboarding on the sidewalk is beginning to change its attitude toward the occasionally destructive pastime.
The weathered concrete pads at Pier 7 were once skate stopped and have had a resurgence since they were de-knobbed.
| Source: Jason Henry for The Standard
The spot remains popular with visitors and locals alike.
| Source: Jason Henry for The Standard
Police clashed with skateboarders and others during the 2023 Dolores Hill Bomb, resulting in more than 100 arrests and citations.
| Source: Aaron Levy-Wolins for The Standard
As recently as 2023, police arrested more than 100 people at the annual unsanctioned Dolores Hill Bomb, drawing enormous backlash .
It was the latest major battle in the city’s long-running conflict against skaters.
In years past, cops have staked out Embarcadero Plaza with patrol cars to arrest skaters (opens in new tab) , pelted them with rubber bullets (opens in new tab) , and even assaulted a 19-year-old (opens in new tab) .
But now the government is spending money to attract what it once considered a pestilent subculture.
Months after the 2023 Hill Bomb debacle, the city swiftly transformed United Nations Plaza into a skate attraction.
Last summer, a concrete skatepark opened at the southern end of Sunset Dunes.
And now, as San Francisco mulls the transformation of the Embarcadero , skaters are playing a key role as design consultants.
It seems the skaters have won the war.
But can the city’s embrace of skateboarding last?
One of the key drivers of San Francisco’s change of heart was, naturally, Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In early 2023, San Francisco had a problem: The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference was just months away, and the city was a mess.
Civic Center, where many of the meetings would be held, had become a magnet for open drug dealing, and civic leaders needed to figure out how to hide its crises before Jinping and President Joe Biden arrived.
United Nations Plaza was especially troubled — and unavoidable for anyone walking between City Hall and Market Street.
So Phil Ginsburg, then the director of the Recreation and Parks Department, came up with an idea.
He had recently returned from a spring trip to Philadelphia, where he was inspired by the sight of skaters at plazas near City Hall.
Perhaps bringing skaters to San Francisco’s Civic Center could transform the space, he thought.
Ginsburg pitched the idea to then-Mayor London Breed.
Breed was initially skeptical but agreed to give it a try, as long as the city could move quickly.
Rec and Parks drew up a hasty plan: turn half of UN Plaza into a quasi-skatepark, and populate the rest with ping-pong tables and exercise equipment.
Mayor London Breed joined other officials and community partners to celebrate the reopening of the UN Skate Plaza in November 2023.
| Source: Justin Katigbak/The Standard
“Plazas have functioned the same way for hundreds, if not thousands, of years,” said Ginsburg, now president of the Sacramento-based nonprofit Resources Legacy Fund.
“They’re gathering spaces, and if you don’t give people healthy reasons to gather, you’re going to default to people gathering for unhealthy reasons.”
The UN Skate Plaza opened less than two weeks before the APEC conference and, three years later, is considered a success by skaters and urban planning types alike (opens in new tab) .
But perhaps the most important advance for the skate community came in the planning process, when Ginsburg and the mayor’s office convened half a dozen skaters as consultants.
These representatives, hand-picked for their ability to speak to both core skaters and city suits, are now the go-to consultants for any city project involving skateboarding.
Ashley Rehfeld (opens in new tab) is one of them.
“It was the first time the city really started to listen to the skateboarding community and learn about our history,” said Rehfeld, longtime skater and marketing director for the major skate distributor DLX.
“There was a new type of dialogue between the different municipal partners involved.”
The city tapped Rehfeld — along with her boss, Jim Thiebaud; skater and art historian Ted Barrow ; and Thrasher Magazine owner Tony Vitello — to consult on the Sunset Dunes skate plaza in 2025.
Officials are in discussions with some of these same people about the future of the Embarcadero.
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In the UN Plaza meetings, Barrow presented slides about skateable mixed-use spaces in Paris and Copenhagen.
Rec and Parks staff were already receptive but seemed especially eager to give skaters a concession after the 2023 Dolores Hill Bomb incident.
“The cops completely overreacted and attacked the skaters and arrested teenagers, and the skaters rioted,” Barrow recalled.
“Up until that point, we were keeping the plans for UN Plaza very, very secret.
And then, within a week, there were two separate stories about how San Francisco is building a skatepark right at City Hall’s doorstep.”
The main library, just steps from UN Plaza, still seeks to deter skaters.
| Source: Jason Henry for The Standard
Barrow believes the city accelerated public discussion of the project in the wake of the Hill Bomb backlash — and thinks that made sense.
After all, Dolores is a residential street where neighbors are likely to complain, while at UN Plaza, “anything would have been better than what was already there.”
New ramps are obviously not a solution to homelessness and addiction, and visitors can still see folks nodding off on the plaza’s polished granite ledges (albeit less often).
Perhaps in a vacuum, dozens of roaming skaters might be seen as a nuisance.
At UN Plaza, though, their presence makes the space feel more active, which may put visitors at ease despite the poverty and desperation that remain.
“I think the relationship between the skateboarders and the non-skateboarders that use that plaza is pretty good,” Barrow said.
“Skateboarders don’t really object to people doing drugs or drinking or, you know, whatever kind of petty crime was happening in that plaza.
We just sort of skate within it and around it.”
Skateboarding is a Californian invention, but anyone who’s watched it at the Olympics can see that plenty of other countries have caught up.
This progress extends beyond the contest course: European cities have pioneered a new approach to skate-friendly urban spaces.
The UN Plaza redesign is considered a success by skaters and urban planner types.
| Source: Jason Henry for The Standard
The French city of Lyon and the Swedish city of Malmö are two shining examples.
(Malmö even employs an “ official skateboarding coordinator (opens in new tab) .”)
Both cities, along with others in France, Denmark, Austria, and beyond have embraced a loose philosophy of skate urbanism, the idea that skateboarding is one thread in a tapestry of active, noncommercial uses of public space.
All cities need to do is give skaters a few nice ledges in a plaza and trust that they’ll play nice with others.
Some U.S. cities are starting to catch on.
Seattle just unveiled a central plaza redesigned with skateboarding in mind — no big ramps, just a few ledges and a promise that police won’t hassle people for grinding them.
New York City officially reopened the historic Brooklyn Banks — a brick walkway under the Brooklyn Bridge — last summer, with the help of skaters.
Los Angeles was a pioneer of the strategy when it sanctioned skating at the West L.A.
Courthouse in 2014.
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None of these places is a skatepark.
They remain open to the general public as outdoor lunch spots and pedestrian promenades, just with some added (or simply repaired) skate features.
That’s kind of the point.
Cities don’t need to spend $5 million building a huge concrete skatepark with a full-pipe and a 9-foot-deep bowl.
Most skaters just want a few smooth granite ledges (which can double as seating when skaters aren’t around), stone tile ground, and a smattering of thoughtfully arranged ramps.
Proponents say this is good news for skaters (and cities) who don’t want to risk their lives (or budgets) on massive halfpipes.
How does this benefit other users?
In Barrow’s words, it invites “a younger, playful group.”
Oftentimes, it activates a space that was neglected to begin with, like the underpass that houses SF’s SoMa skatepark.
And, like at UN Plaza, it can push more maligned uses elsewhere.
“Skateboarders are viewed as the most desirable of the undesirables,” said Portland, Oregon-based landscape architect Taj Hanson, a leading advocate of skate urbanism in the U.S.
Ocean Howell, a pro skater turned urban planning professor, once termed skaters “ the shock troops of gentrification (opens in new tab) ,” arguing that they helped office workers feel more comfortable in Philadelphia’s once-seedy Love Park, laying the groundwork for a demographic transformation of the entire area.
But while skaters welcome sanctioned spots, skating in forbidden locations remains central to the culture.
One of these locations is just steps from UN Plaza: the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library.
One of the most revered street clips (opens in new tab) of all time was filmed at the library in 1999.
It’s nighttime, and Mike Carroll, a Daly City native who’s a sort of demigod for Gen X skaters, appears like a spirit from behind a trash can.
He rifles off a kickflip and a pristine 360 flip, pushes hungrily, then lofts three more tricks.
(An earlier version of this description included all the trick names but was cut by my editor, whose patience has limits.)
Each trick is a formal ideal, and the line makes the plaza look like a paradise.
But in the new millennium, the library deployed skate stoppers to devastating effect, barring skaters from its gaps and ledges.
In recent years, skaters armed with crowbars and screwdrivers have returned and pried the stoppers off.
Observers wondered whether the city might look the other way, and for about a year, the spot appeared to fly under the radar.
But earlier this summer, the stoppers returned — at a total cost of nearly $3,000, according to a library spokesperson.
The library recently spent nearly $3,000 to replace stoppers that skaters had removed.
| Source: Jason Henry for The Standard
Michael Lambert, SF’s city librarian, is sympathetic to skaters.
He’s a lifelong skater himself, and last year the library hosted an award-winning exhibition, “Skateboarding San Francisco: Concrete, Continuity, and Community,” which Barrow curated.
But Lambert says there’s a limit to the benefits of skateboarding in a public space.
“As far as the main library as an epic, iconic skateboarding spot, this is where, as a department head entrusted with the stewardship of this community resource, I have to shoo away the skaters,” Lambert said.
“That space is for a different purpose.”
Even Ginsburg, the original government-side champion of skating in SF, conceded that there are places where skating is not appropriate.
“I mean, the term is grinding ,” Ginsburg said, laughing.
“That does, over time, have wear and tear on infrastructure.”
Nobody expects every plaza in San Francisco to welcome skaters with open arms.
In fact, that would be a kind of disaster for a street skating culture where illicitness is part of the fun.
Filming yourself with your iPhone in a skatepark is fine for Instagram.
But the videos that earn respect are filmed on dedicated cameras at street spots, including places that might earn you a citation for trespassing.
It’s how professionals secure sponsorship and build their legacies.
And that isn’t likely to change, no matter how many skate-friendly plazas cities build.
An Oakland graffiti writer once told me that graffiti has two elements: the art and the street.
The street part is about claiming and defending spots — sometimes using violence — as part of a crew.
It’s about breaking the law.
There are no crews of skaters beating each other up, but there is a street element to skateboarding too.
It’s meaningful because it’s a struggle.
“Part of street skating is creating agency for ourselves in a hostile urban environment,” Hanson said.
San Francisco was once such an environment — graying skaters describe a city in which cops would hassle them for fun, shoving them into squad cars and even jail cells just for skateboarding.
(Skating on sidewalks and after dark remains illegal in San Francisco, though the law is not enforced.)
At that time, one veteran said, the idea of a designated skate plaza downtown would have seemed as outlandish as legal weed for sale in stores or self-driving cars.
Skaters Mickey Reyes and Jef Whitehead in a BART Police car, 1989.
San Francisco once arrested people for skateboarding; skating on sidewalks and after dark remains illegal today.
| Source: Courtesy Tobin Yelland
Clearly, times have changed.
If cities dispense with the hostility entirely, does street skating lose some of its magic?
Despite the recent advances, that future still seems a long way off.
In fact, some civic-minded skaters in SF wonder if their influence is already waning.
Ginsburg is retired, and skaters are serving their “shock troop” purpose at UN Plaza.
Recreation and Parks has spent around $9 million on skate infrastructure in the last decade, according to a spokesperson.
It’s easy to imagine a city obsessed with AI that decides it’s given enough to skaters and finds some shiny new activity to fixate on.
There’s even uncertainty over whether the city will heed its skate consultants and install ledges at the redesigned Embarcadero, or if a small plaque will be installed as a fig-leaf reminder of the legendary spot’s history .
But regardless of whether San Francisco’s relationship with skateboarding is in a new chapter or just a short-lived detour, kids will continue picking up boards.
The majority of local skaters, especially young ones, do not know or care about negotiations with the city.
They care about learning tricks, filming clips, and finding new spots, and they’re going to continue whether officials approve or not.
That freedom from approval is part of the appeal, after all.
It’s what attracted me to skateboarding in 2006 and part of why I’m still having fun 20 years later.
A popular slogan when I was a kid was, “Never stop jumping fences.”
That spirit persists.
I think it always will.
On a recent cloudy afternoon at Pier 7, two kids no older than 13 practiced ollieing onto and off of the storied pads.
One wore a hoodie with the insignia of a local skate shop.
“Alright,” he said to his friend.
“Kickflip, right here.”
More about the author
Max Harrison-Caldwell
@low___impact (opens in new tab)
Max Harrison-Caldwell is a news reporter at The San Francisco Standard who focuses on housing, culture, and breaking news.
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