Crooked Grind
Portraits & Stories from the Denver Skate Park
2023 - Ongoing
“It’s like a refuge. It’s like therapy. It’s like a city.”
This long form project features the individuals at the Denver Skatepark (known as DPark by the community) that is located in my neighborhood, a high density section in the downtown area. Many who live in my neighborhood know very little about the skaters who come together day and night to practice their skills and hangout. To the residents of the neighborhood, the skaters are a blur, too loud and messy; there is tension between the skaters and the residents
The Denver Park Locals are a community of individuals who see themselves as outsiders. “This is the only place I fit in” is a common answer when asked why they come to this place. They gather regularly to create a sense of belonging and have formed a tight-knit community providing not just friendship and skill practice, but also food, phones, housing and protection. The neighborhood nor city social services seem to know little about them.
Short term, the project is shaped by digital color photographs and video. Long term, the project is expanding to add deeper narratives of the lives of some of the Locals, using digital photographs, interviews, video, audio, my writing as well as the photos, diaries and artwork of the Locals themselves.
I want this project to culminate in an installation at the Park using wheat paste photos, large silk banners of photos and art to hang around the 60,000 square foot park, a ‘zine , and an event bringing neighbors and social service resources to the Park.
Meet Jack
It’s late morning on Friday, August 12th. Nearly noon. The sky in downtown Denver is cloudless and brilliant blue. The temperature is at least 93 degrees. Nothing is a blur. Nothing is soft. Not the asphalt of the parking lot beside the First Baptist Church on Grant Street. Not the white glare that hits the other parked cars in the lot, a glare that burns my neck no matter how quickly I walk from the street sidewalk to the far end of the lot where Jack is standing.
Jack “Reaper” Smith has invited me to visit this place near the Capitol, one of two Colorado Safe Parking Initiative sites in Denver for people experiencing homelessness. Jack is a long-time skateboarder, a member of the Denver Park Locals. He is an Afghanistan war veteran, a father, cancer survivor, unemployed. Lately, he spends most days at the Park. In the diary he shared with me he writes, “In high school I was always an adrenaline junkie. Skateboard fast, jump over every stair and curb I came upon.” When I first met him at DPark in May, he was breaking up a fight, standing between two guys who were nearly in each other’s faces, yelling, holding up their skateboards, threatening to hurt. Later that night, I introduced myself to Jack and he agreed to participate in my ICP project.
On this Friday in August Jack is cleaning his car. “I finally had a chance to charge the battery of this portable vacuum” he said. “After I finally got it back from the fucking jerk I lent it to. I hope it lasts for the whole time I need to clean.”
I start using the camera to document what’s going on. He walks to the passenger side of the car and says I can sit inside if I want. Or walk around. “Whatever,” Jack says, “I’m sorry it’s so dirty.” I notice all four windows of his car are rolled down just an inch or less. In a community I know nothing about, I try to fill the silence, to come up with a response, and fail. “All the windows are barely rolled down,” I say. Jacks tells me that’s because he needs to be safe during the night. “Jokers come around here all the time and try to steal my shit.”
Summer is not a time of easy living for Jack. Neither (I presume), is fall, winter or spring. Trying to keep his home organized, clean. Trying to cool the heat inside and remain safe. Trying to keep the cold outside and remain safe. Trying to eat. Stretch out. Sleep peacefully.
I didn’t cry at this moment. Yet, when I realized how central and necessary it has been--and still is--for Jack to lead a hyper-vigilant life, I felt very sad. And later, I thought a long time about what it might look like to measure vigilance in a photo. Or to measure a kindness.
This city is so complicated. It is a place as much about displacement and injustice as it is about being kind.
Meet Niffer
“Yeah. I was doing a handstand through the pit and I went to the up ramp. I was trying to pump it and I bent my elbow and just brought myself down to my knee so bad I couldn't bend it. And then it hurt. It hurt. It still hurts, but skateboarding helps. Pushing around makes it feel better. It gives it movement.”
Jennifer “Niffer” Cole tosses back her head, brushes a strand of hair away from her cheek and laughs heartily, a laugh that anyone who is at the Denver Skate Park today will recognize as hers. We sit side by side on a concrete ledge and it’s busy at the Park. It’s October 1st and this story Niffer tells me is one of many stories she has told me about pain.
When I first met Niffer it was four months earlier, on a Sunday afternoon in May. It was my second visit to DPark. The main courage I had that day was to sit very still on a ledge at the Park entrance partially hidden by a pillar busy with graftitti. I placed myself in a solid corner with something to lean against.
The energy in the Park was without pause. Bodies of all shapes and sizes—whether moving or standing still--seemed restless, expectant. It was hard to decide where to put my attention. Soon, I saw a woman approaching. Not with feet on a skateboard and knees slightly bent, but with two hands placed on a skateboard, two legs raised up in the air and four ends of shoe laces dangling in an open pocket of sky. She was an approaching hand-stand, weaving her way through a crowd of upright, feet-pushing skateboarders. She was laughing. It was startling, this stance. Both assured and wobbly.
She was holding on upside down.
She moved past me and as her board began to slow, she dropped her feet to the ground, kicked her board so an edge landed in her right palm, turned and walked over to me. She sat down and asked, “Do you want to take pictures of me doing a handstand on my board? I’m famous around here for doing handstands. Everyone calls me Niffer.” Of course.
That moment marked a kind of momentum for understanding my project. Emotional candor. Freedom and swift, emphatic coolness. Generosity. A wondering about what is asked of a body by tossing it upside down. And then the others she introduced me to kept things moving, a group of regulars, the Dener Park Locals, who share their stories of risk and pain, who, like Niffer, have a way of holding all the aches of happiness and pain. In a day.
When Niffer told me that day in October about her fall from the moving handstand trick and her knee injury, I said, “I think you might have a high tolerance for pain.” She laughed again. “I’ve altered my relationship with pain, actually. I used to wear shin guards all the time, and knee pads. I finally got rid of the shin guards and pads. Because my shins don’t have connective tissue. It’s just bone. So I’m just slamming my bones and I’m good, man.”
