He and a rotating cast of other skaters have steadily built Mosquito Beach for several years, walloping the expected life span of a DIY spot. The spot is hidden beneath the Long Island Expressway. Mosquito Beach is a DIY spot filled with ramps built by Pat Smith and a rotating cast of skaters. “You have a desire to skate something and you’re filling the void.” It’s not just one thing.” Smith, a lifelong skateboarder and former professional, says it’s the culture’s DIY ethos.
“They want to contribute to the scene, they want to skate something exactly how they want it, they want to provide another option. So what drives them to do it? “People want to leave their mark,” said Steve Rodriguez, founder of the storied New York City skateboard company 5boro. “A lot of other ones only lasted a week, and some have actually lasted for years.” “I’ve probably built at least 30 spots that were gone the next morning,” said Jerry Mraz, one of the city’s most prolific builders over the past decade and a half. This means skaters might pour significant time and resources into building a spot only to find their work completely demolished within a day. While skaters typically attempt these DIY projects in relatively unpopulated zones of the city, they are - by and large - illegal, especially when built on public property sans permit. Mosquito Beach is rare among them, a swampy hideout with an abundance of sloped banks and quarter-pipe ramps. In both scale and longevity, Mosquito Beach is an outlier among the city’s DIY spots, which range from daubs of concrete spread across rough obstacles to fully constructed benches and curbs planted overnight in the cityscape, a sprawling circuit of ridable spaces existing in tandem with the 37 sanctioned skate parks of New York City.
Because of its proximity to a fetid stretch of Newton Creek, the spot has become known as Mosquito Beach.
Smith, 50, was on his way to work on a public secret in the city’s skateboarding scene: an elaborate, unsanctioned DIY skate spot hidden beneath the rusty pillars of the Long Island Expressway.
Diy skate ramp plans portable#
Inside the van, he’d hoisted around eight dusty bags of concrete, a stack of dirty buckets, two crusty shovels, a generator, and a portable concrete mixer.
Diy skate ramp plans professional#
On a balmy July evening, Pat Smith, a professional carpenter and the owner of CODA Skateboards, was loading up his jet-black Ram ProMaster cargo van in the driveway of a Greenpoint fabrication shop. Pat Smith mixing concrete for a quarter-pipe at Mosquito Beach while Max Lockhart, a skater, looks on.
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