Brooklyn Banks Skates Back From Its 15-Year Closure
August 12, 2025
Skate parks might feel ubiquitous in New York, but they’re a relatively new addition to the city, as the first official one didn’t open until 1996. Long before that, though, local skateboarders weren’t lacking for places to grind and ollie. As renowned skateboarder and Brooklyn native Giovanni Reda told Thrasher Magazine in 2020, “We never needed skate parks, because we had one.”
The “one” he’s referring to is one of the most famous skating spots in America, if not the world, and it’s right here in Lower Manhattan. Known as Brooklyn Banks, the brick plaza underneath the Brooklyn Bridge in Gotham Park has long been a haven for skateboarders, and this June, after nearly a decade and a half of construction and renovation, it finally reopened to the public. It’s a monumental return for the city’s skating culture, and a throwback to the feral skating days of the 1980s and ’90s.
The skating area is located in a two-acre spot of Gotham Park known as “the arches,” dubbed as such for the Brooklyn Bridge’s iconic brick arches that surround it. The area earned its “Brooklyn Banks” nickname thanks to its long stretches of sloping banks on either side, creating an ideal situation for freely skating back and forth. Combined with a few rails, pillars and other surfaces to grind on, the plaza attracts hordes of skaters like moths to a flame.
The Banks closed in 2010 to be used as a staging area for construction work on the bridge, and fans weren’t sure the skate park would ever return. But Tony Hawk’s nonprofit, the Skatepark Project, helped advocate for its reopening, along with other skating advocates and 53,000 signatories to an online petition. In 2023, they won the battle: Mayor Eric Adams announced then that the city would work to redevelop and reopen the site.
“It’s such an iconic, legendary spot in the world of skateboarding,” Hawk told the New York Times in 2023. “The idea that we are helping to revitalize it, and to reopen it, is something that I feel very lucky to be part of.” (It’s worth noting that Hawk himself never actually got to skate at Brooklyn Banks, though the park was featured as a location in his Pro Skater video game series.)
The origin of the park dates back to the creation of the Brooklyn Bridge, when the city-owned land was used for constructing the original span. Trolleys were removed from the bridge in the 1950s to make room for more cars, and exit ramps were soon added to the Manhattan side. In 1972, the city turned the area around those ramps into a pedestrian plaza, which bikers and skaters quickly discovered for its sloping banks and relatively expansive open skating space. And there was another appeal: few non-skaters paid attention to the space, so skaters were free to do their thing without fear of getting kicked out.
“It was like out of Batman,” Jefferson Pang, who skated the Banks in the ’80s, told the Times. “It was like a cathedral, like a dark Gothic place where it felt like a supervillain or a superhero would make an appearance out of nowhere.”
Older videos of the Banks echo many of the images of Manhattan in the ’90s: graffiti covered walls, crumbling bricks and piles of rubble. The newly reopened park, meanwhile, looks bright, elegant and smooth, with saplings of new trees planted in concrete boxes. The park also includes basketball, handball and shuffleboard courts. The adjacent walls under the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge — where casks of wine were once stored! — got a refresh, too, with brightly shining brickwork backdropping sick skateboarding moves.
For skaters, the return of the Banks is a return home.
“If it wasn’t for the Banks, a lot of people would not have their career started in skateboarding,” skater Javier Nunez told Thrasher Magazine. “That place was more than a skate spot, it was a place where a lot of kids from broken homes and different walks of life could go and forget about all those things and just skateboard collectively. No matter who you were, where you from, what race you were, it was a place where everybody would meet and forget everything else that was going on in life.”
And it looks like Brooklyn Banks will continue to live on for generations — on a recent Tuesday morning, the new plaza was full of young kids doing a summer skate camp, led by a few adult instructors who guided them through the plaza and showed them how to grind down on the handrails. New York may change over the decades, but some things stay the same.
