The Current State of Love
Josh Perez talks to Team Nocturnal's own Scott Kip about Love Park, The Philly Scene, and his key role as a leading activist and
skater in the city of brotherly love.
When LOVE went off limits to all of US, The local skaters did a wonderful thing...They got organized. In comes Scott Kip, local resident and rider for Kerry Getz & Tim Quinn's impressive Nocturnal team. This alone is more than reason enough for an interview. However Scott Kip is not just an impressive inner-city ripper, Scott wears another hat, and it's big and white. Scott is the President of the Skateboard Advocacy Network in Philadelphia. Love Park may currently be a "NO SKATE ZONE",
and incur heavy fines if caught hitting this legendary spot, but Scott Kip says:
"Love will re-open!"
Hey Scott, you have to be pretty stoked about being on the Nocturnal team.
How did it happen for you
Do you mean “Are you sponsored for being an activist?” I was actually on the team before we started organizing anything.I guess it was spring of 2003. Tim Quinn approached me while I was skating at City Hall one day and asked me to stop by the shop to talk to him. I thought I was in trouble or something, but he asked me to ride for the shop. I was skating for Sub Zero at that point and things were kinda slow there. I guess Tim heard about it and he asked me to ride for Noc-T. I also get
clothes from Skatenerd and a little flow from eS. There you have it. Stoked. Actually, I got sponsored because I fucking kill Barney Rubble grinds. I’ve got them on lock.
Growing up who were like your standard skate buddy's?
I was born in Philly and lived here until I was 13, then I moved to a small town in upstate New York. There was nothing going on there except high school sports
and beer parties in the woods. I was miserable until
I started skating and met some people from Binghamton, NY, the nearest city. In the nineties there was a great skate scene in Bing and I grew up skating there. There were no parks or ramps there, just schoolyards and the streets. We would spend the winter skating on the bottom level of a parking garage. It went four stories underground so it stayed pretty warm compared to outside. I pretty much grew up skating flatground and manuals. Most of my old skate friends still skate on occasion. Some of them are in DC doing grad school
or working and others are in Rochester.
Tell me in as much detail as you can about the good ol days when Love was the rage
The good ol’ days? When was that? You could write a
book about everything that happened at Love, skate and non-skate related.
The way that a particular architectural movement
combined with a location and an iconic work of public
art to create a national scene is worth a good amount of study. Just writing about skateboarding there is still a good amount to cover.
It was great to be able to just go to the park and see what was going down that day. Lots of things got done that never got filmed or documented. Just people dorking around. I swear,
I saw Stevie switch ollie up one of the levels to switch manual and switch heel flip out up the next level. Things like
that would happen. You could watch Stevie, Josh Kalis and Tony Montgomery play a game of skate and you’re mind would get blown. Flatground destruction.
But more than that it was just a great place to chill with your friends. It was the meet up spot, there was always someone there to skate with. It was interesting to watch the place change as skating changed. It had lots of phases and crews would come and go. There was this one kid who would come out with his friends sometimes. He was kinda hyperactive but not distracted, really focused. He
would just throw himself at anything, nose manual nollie flips and handrails alike. I ran into that crew late one night and we ended up just having fun dropping into the big handrail at the Municipal Services Building.
Just putting our boards down and dropping in. That kid was Chris Cole. It was probably 1996 or something, back in the Ricky, Matt Reason, Sergi Trudnowski days.
Is there any new legislature in the works to recapture Love or is it like pissing up a rope?
Let me put it this way: LOVE WILL RE-OPEN. There are people, skate-boarders and
non-skateboarders, who are dedicated to making it happen. We have been told by the governor of Pennsylvania that it is only a matter of time. People on the city council have said the same thing. There is so much support for it to happen that we just have to wait for the administration to change to reconsider
the ban or simply end.
Here’s the thing about Love, we need to get skating incorporated there with the city’s permission and have it be successful. Everyone knows that people skated there for 10 years without any big problems but the city won’t accept that. If we can get Love reopened it can be used as an example of how a city can deal with the problem of skateboarding.
About pissing up a rope: Skateboarders need to recognize! There are 15 million
of us out there, we need to stop thinking in self-defeating ways. Don’t let other people treat you as if you are a useless fuck-up because you may start believing it. Skateboarders are amazingly dedicated. Skateboarding is unbelievably hard but people don’t know it. Think about it- How hard did you work to learn how to kickflip? It seemed impossible at first, right? If you hadn’t seen so many people doing them so easily you may not have thought it possible but now you do them every day. You missed the first one thousand tries
and kept trying because you knew you could do it. Just think about what would
happen if 15 million people applied that determination towards getting their town to let them skate somewhere besides the local modular skatepark on the gravel lot behind the local landfill. Don’t let your town security guard convince you that you’re a second-class citizen because you skate. Don’t let people convince you that working for a decent place to skate is a waste of time or they have won already.
Back to Love: there are some other people getting involved right now but there isn’t anything we can announce… yet. We are also planning some large scale civil disobedience events there for the spring. Keep an eye on the skate websites for info on that.
How have the locals adapted to the loss of one of the best skate locations in the world?
It’s lost? There are patrols for sure but you can still skate there at night. It hasn’t been the meet up spot for a while but people still skate there. The planters in front of the main ledge totally revitalized it. There have been more tricks done on the ledge over the planters in the past year or two than tricks that got done in the old days. It’s more fun now that you have to do the whole thing. By trying to skate stop it they made it more fun than ever.
And you can grind or manual then drop to another trick on the planter. I don’t
want to give away people’s tricks before they come out, but I’ve seen nollie nose grind, nollie crooked grind, switch back tail, switch nose grind, nollie shove backside five-o, front board, nose blunt slide, everything done end to end, the whole thing.
Really, the city did a pretty bad job of skate-proofing Love. They put in new lighting which makes it bright as day there and the ground is so good that people would skate there anyway, even if there weren’t any ledges to skate. The levels and the three sets are perfect for learning. The place is just a granite wonderland. It’s not dead at all, you just have to be a little more careful.
Ok Scott, say I hit Philly with board in hand...first stop: Nocturnal. Then what?
Street tranny
Afro Banks- 7
th and Arch
Jersey barrier- 9
th and Vine
FDR park- way down South Broad
Ledges/benches
Love Park- 15
th and JFK (always check it, you never know)
Municipal Services Building- 15th and JFK
City Hall- 15
th and JFK
Burnt Cat- 13
th and Carpenter
Under the Bridge- Front and Tasker (if it’s summer)
There are too many places to list. Just skate around!
Weather has to be a pain in the ass sometimes. How long does the standard Philly winter last,
and how do u adapt?
The winters are inconsistent here. Sometimes they’re long and wet and other times they’re not too bad. There aren’t many indoor parks around here so everyone just has to make do. It sucks, really. Did you see that photo of Rich Adler back-lipping the snow pile?
Yeah I caught that, good shit! What are some of the experiences that have really stood out in your skate life?
It’s been thirteen years there were too many good days to remember them all.
Just having one of those days where you can do all of the tricks you can do is good.
I guess there have been some moments… Sitting in a suit in the office of the number two person in the Philadelphia City government and talking about why skating in Love is good for the city was pretty surreal. My mind would just step back for a second and say “Holy Shit! How did I get here? What am I doing?”
I guess a good way to be successful is just don’t ever quit.
I read in a back issue of the Philly local rag that the city was going to give the skaters certain times during the day to skate love...I know your still
skating love, but did that ever come to pass? Legit times?
Well, one of the city’s complaints about letting people skate at Love was that there were business luncher's that wanted to use the park. They assumed the people would be disturbed by skateboarders so we said that we wouldn’t skate in the park until after 3:00 pm. The idea was to limit skateboarding by time instead of space. It was one of the big parts of our proposal to the city but unfortunately, it hasn’t happened yet.
Also for those of us that wish to speak out and aid the fight for Love Park, What are some of the avenues we can take and be heard?
Well, the petition is closed at 10,001 entries so that’s pretty much done for now. I think the best thing you can do to help skating at Love is check the SAN web site this spring to find out when the next civil disobedience events will be. We need to get armies of skaters to come to Philly and take over for a weekend. There are some secret plans cookin’ in the back room, too, but I can’t say yet… You will all be invited to help out, don’t worry.
About that petition: My friend Greg Heller’s father runs the
USHistory.org site and he has personally read and cataloged every one of the entries in that petition. Can you imagine? He probably knows more about how skaters feel about Love Park than anyone else. He read every single on of those things!
Who are the skaters that are really blowing your mind now?
Man! These are hard questions! There are too many. John Kroesser is amazing and nobody knows yet. Who else? What happened to Mike Bruno? He was a little kid from somewhere around Philly who had absolutely perfect flips. Total precision. Kickflip nose manual to nollie 360 flip on the main ledge at Love in 99. Front nose nollie flip out on a ledge with no ends. That kid was fucking amazing. Where’d he go? Are there kids like him in every scene who just vanish somewhere?
Scott tell us a little..or alot about skatenerd.
Skatenerd.com started sometime in the mid Nineties. It was just a message board for Philly kids who were obsessed with skateboarding but it slowly grew into a really good skateboard news site with lots of other stuff mixed in.
You never know what kind of crazy shit you’re going to find on there. There are a bunch of people who post there, mostly friends from the Philly scene. Some of them have moved on to other places (like Japan and Cambodia) but they still post things. I think the site is getting around 60,000 hits a month or so.
Sometime in 2003 they decided to make a clothing company, too and that’s when I got involved. They had always had Skatenerd t-shirts but they wanted to start passing them out to people. They’re not very big, they only sell through a few shops like Nocturnal, Autumn and some others.
After the clothing started selling well they wanted to get a store front to sell from and to use as an office. John Freeborn hooked them up with a space in Old City (a Philly neighborhood) near all the art galleries. They started having art shows for skateboarders. They got too big for the space and now they’re just off of South Street on 6
th and Bainbridge, three blocks from Nocturnal and two blocks from Sub Zero. They have bigger shows now and the openings are always a shitstorm of a party. It’s a great time to see everyone you don’t get to see anymore. Everyone comes out.
What is your all time favorite vid and what was your favorite vid for 2004, and why?
Man, I don’t know. There are too many to list. Static II is great. Bobby can make riding off a curb look good. Ricky, Damian, Rich, Jack… everyone.
Some skate videos are like watching the news, you just want to see who did what on what now. You see them and it’s amazing but you’re not really drawn
back to watch the stunts too many more times. Are you really that inspired
by giant-sized stunts? I like to watch skating that I can identify with. I probably won’t ever have the quickness to ollie up and then 360 flip a gap to Nose manual like MJ in Yeah Right, but I bet I would have a lot of fun trying.
What trick did you learn today?
Today? It’s only 10:38 am and I’m still at work. I’ve been itching to work on some fakie manual stuff lately, I gotta go find a good manual spot. Do you ever sit at school or work and just feel like doing a certain trick? Do you ever just get it in your head and want to try something and can’t get rid of the thought, like having a song stuck in your head?
What's your take on the lil rippers out there shaking shit up like Sheckler and Ramirez?
What can you say? Those guys are amazing. Where do you go when you came out that strong?
Where do you see yourself in like 5 years?
2010? Does that seem scary to you? Shit! I would like to be working from my studio at home and skating the Schuylkill River park everyday, keeping everything nice and tight.
Any video parts in the near future for ya?
Maybe a Nocturnal part if I can get the time and we all get our acts together.
What kind of music is best to skate a demo to?
Whatever. No music is really going to fix what’s wrong with a demo, it’s only going to make it worse. Have you ever been to one of those skateparks with a huge sound system that just blasts the worst music? Most skateparks are big hollow rooms with lots of echoes, they sound like a tin can. Honestly, I’d just rather hear my board.
Philly Cheese steak or Mickey D's?
Is that a threat? Veggie quesadilla. Maybe a cheese steak once or twice a year. I’m not against it, I just don’t get hungry for one very often.
Mc D’s only in case of emergency. Who wants to give their money to an international corporation?
Ok Scott you have enlightened us immensely about Love Park. What wisdom can you pass along to all the users of Ramprage.com about the
skating lifestyle?
The skating lifestyle? There are too many versions of that to count. Personally, I live in a big city where I can live by the board. I can skate to work and skate to the grocery store and skate to class. Philly is great like that. Come move here and get yourself a skate house in South Philly and a job at Bertucci’s and live the skateboard life.
Check:
www.skatespots.com for spots near you.
Scott Kip footy
click here
