Seeking Law and Order on a Crowded Playground

Bronx Park – Teenage Skaters in Bronx Park – More Rules Now, Please – NYTimes.com

Bronx Park

Seeking Law and Order on a Crowded Playground

By KATHERINE BINDLEY

THE teenagers who hang out at the skate park that opened at the end of June in Bronx Park are grateful for its arrival.

From early morning until dinnertime, on a 6,000-square-foot site northeast of the New York Botanical Garden, their skateboards can be heard rumbling back and forth between the quarter-pipe ramps, each ride punctuated by a smack as they reach the top.

These teenagers have just one request. They’d like some rules, please.

“There’s no age limit right now,” said Tyriq Holloway, a 17-year-old from Eastchester who was wearing a striped knit hat on a recent hot August afternoon. He and other skate park regulars are frustrated by the number of children between the ages of 5 and 7 who, they say, make the area dangerous by riding their bikes around the skate park without supervision. “People get hurt cause they don’t know what they’re doing,” he said.

Tyriq raised this issue one day recently with a parks department employee who was driving by.

“I said, ‘Can we do anything about the little kids?’ ” Tyriq recalled. In response, he said, the woman asked if anything could be done about the teenagers.

“She was joking around,” Tyriq said. “But I told her a lot of little kids are in the way, and people get hurt.”

Michael Maldonado, a 14-year-old who lives just east of the park in the Bronxdale neighborhood, had a bad fall in the park and had to take six weeks off from skateboarding.

“I was skateboarding on the hubba,” he said, pointing to a metal box in the center of the area where he does tricks. “A little kid got in my way on a bike and I jumped off and I landed straight on my ankle and broke it.”

Michael said that the child, a boy, was 4 or 5 and seemed to know how to ride his bike. “But there was nobody here to watch him,” Michael said.

The parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, said that setting a minimum age would be arbitrary because some experienced skaters might be as young as 6 or 8. In addition, he said, while many other city skate parks have attendants and require users to sign a waiver releasing the parks department from responsibility in case of an accident, the one at Bronx Park is designed so as not to require either. “Everything there is three feet high or less,” Mr. Benepe said.

Many skaters say that even parents in the vicinity rarely keep an eye on their youngsters. One exception the other day was Michael Saunders, who works at a telephone company and grew up in Bronxdale when the only place to skate was the sidewalk or the street.

“Anybody under 13 definitely should have parental supervision coming to the park,” Mr. Saunders said as he kept an eye on his 7-year-old son, Jalen, who was wearing a helmet and had a large hole in the right knee of his jeans. “Anything can happen here.”

[NYT]