Lomography

Love Park
written by tommynorth on October 26th, 2009 , 9 comments (2 votes)

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So this is Love Park or JKF Plaza as its officially known. This used to be the eastern seaboards skating mecca before “the man” came and shut it down.

Desingedand built in 1965 the park is next to City Hall and was designed as a terminus for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

In the 80’s many skateboarders came to skate here, all the clean lines and smooth surfaces and other such things proved irresistable to these fun loving kids. It wa in the 90’s that it blew up here, big names traveling from around the globe to skate here cemented its status as the park of legends and it hosted the x-games two years on the trot in 2001-2002. Pretty cool.

Then the man (Mayor John Street) came along in 2002 and said “we will be having none of this skateboarding business here thank you” even though the park attracted millions of dollars in tourist money. He planted trees and bushes and other obstructions. Made the fines for skateboarding huge and did other bastardy things. Oh yeah he also promised to build a new better park in his re-election campaign but that never happened. Man! Why does the man have to be so hard! We wouldnt always be saying “damn the man” and trying to stick it to him if he was cool.

So when i went here there were some guys on BMX’s and trial bikes doing some stuff and some wino’s staying out the shade. It felt a bit stale and i am pretty sure that if it were still a skating mecca office workers would love to watch kids break themselves whilst eating a sandwich. I know I would