Baltimore is Finally Embracing Its Skateboarding Community

Towson-raised professional skateboarder Joey Jett, 25—who rose to national acclaim when he was only seven—found a sense of freedom and belonging in the sport. Today, he’s sharing that with future generations. In addition to creating his own skate-inspired streetwear line, JETT Brand Clothing, he helped to organize fundraising efforts to launch Jake’s Skate Park at Rash Field. Opened last year, the park was built in honor of a five-year-old skateboarder named Jake Owen who was killed by a distracted driver. At Jake’s Skate Park, Jett offers free lessons to children 12 and under as part of an event called Boards and Breakfast.  Here, Jett talks about his journey.

When I was six, I thought my neighbor was the coolest person ever. He was five years older than me, and he was always on a skateboard, so, eventually, I grabbed my own. At first, I was bad at skating—probably way worse than the average person who first steps on a skateboard. But it pretty much became my life. Within an eight-month period, I became the youngest skateboarder to do a backflip, was invited to the Dew Tour, and won about 50 contests in a row.

At 10 years old, I quit. When I first started skating, it felt natural. But once I joined the competition circuit, there was more pressure. People were predicting that I would become the next Tony Hawk. But all I really wanted to do was be a normal kid. What I first loved about skateboarding was the freedom that it brings—the creativity, the fun, the adrenaline.

Five years later, I moved to Calvert County. I knew one person at my new high school, my stepbrother, who told everyone I was a professional skateboarder. Here I was, 4 foot 7, with buck teeth. I had nothing to lose, and so I kind of went along with it. Soon, other skaters started coming up to me, inviting me to skate with them. I was terrified because I hadn’t done it in five years. I basically lost everything I knew when I was younger. I was at a beginner level—couldn’t even do one trick—but they accepted me.

From there, we skated every day. I filmed a couple videos in high school. Filming with my friends got me back to the real reason I fell in love with skateboarding in the first place. There was no contest, it was just about creating new tricks and having the freedom to be able to do whatever you want without being judged. I sent one to Mike Vallely, who was my favorite professional skater when I was starting out. He said, ‘I really liked this video. You should meet me on tour.’

From there, I ended up going to Japan, Denmark, Greece, Italy—all around the world—and then, Mike named me pro. I did that for three years and then I started my own clothing line, JETT Brand, and now that’s what I do.

I also helped raise money for the opening of Jake’s Skate Park at Rash Field. At the time, I had just finished touring the world for about three years. I was planning a really big art show in Baltimore, and Jake’s family approached me and said, ‘We would love to do this show with you. Would you mind helping us raise funds for a skate park?’ I really wanted to help make it happen, for them and for Baltimore. I felt like we needed a skate park.

We did the art show and ended up selling out and raising $35,000. When opening day came around, it was cool to see everyone there. I wouldn’t trade the feeling of seeing that community blossom for anything.

When you’re a kid, skate parks can be intimidating. I decided to create Boards and Breakfast at Jake’s Skate Park just for them. I picked up skateboarding at such a young age, and never really had a teacher, I just learned it in my own way. So now, teaching kids is very natural for me. I know exactly how to work with them. To see them with big smiles, and such excitement for skateboarding, makes me get excited, too. That’s what I’m here for. I’m not really into gatekeeping. I’m here to teach people new skills and help them be creative, because I know what that’s done in my own life.

If I can help inspire one kid, or help them be creative, then that’s good enough for me.

Shortly after sunrise, on most mornings during this peculiar pandemic-stricken summer, strollers, joggers and dog walkers in Baltimore’s Roosevelt Park go about their routines to the odd rhythm of maple, polyurethane, and aluminum repeatedly cracking against concrete.

The awkward beat is augmented by a unique fusion of frustrated grunts and exasperated exhales followed by the occasional profane exclamation spicing up the cadence. That odd mix of sounds may seem exotic, but anyone who has spent time on city streets, suburban cul de sacs, or in public parks, should recognize the cacophony as the sound of skateboarding.

In the early morning hours, however, it’s not the stereotypical teenaged, mayo boy, Mountain Dew enthusiasts, who create the clamor.

It’s a gaggle of early-morning pushers consisting mostly of professional men in their 30s and 40s. Guys who, prior to COVID-19, spent early-morning hours commuting to work, coaxing reluctant children to get dressed for school, and queuing for Starbucks.

Jarret Jeffery, 35, a married father of three who teaches in Prince George’s County, is among the most dedicated of Hampden’s early-morning skaters. Since schools closed, Jeffery has used the time he would’ve spent driving to work on his board.

“That huge chunk of time that I have now, I’ve been throwing that into spending time with family and skateboarding,” Jeffery says.

Fittingly, Jeffery, bespectacled, about five feet, five inches tall, and wearing a pair of mid top Vans with duct tape on the left front toe, approaches skating with the methodical nature of a science and math teacher.

He occasionally heads to the skatepark with a list of tricks he’s working on, and checks them off as he practices. Doggedly, and adroitly, Jeffery works on moves repeatedly, tweaking his technique after each failed attempt until he lands the maneuver.

On a recent morning, he skated alone on an elevated ramp, diligently practicing his front-side boardslide. Over and over, Jeffrey cruised up the nearly vertical wall of the ramp, pushed his board’s front wheels over the ramp’s metal coping, and used the slick bottom of his board to slide along the ledge before rolling back down the ramp “fakie,” aka with his dominant foot on the front of the board.

“These last few weeks things have just been clicking, and I think that’s because I’ve been consistent with my practicing, and taking breaks too, because I’m an old dude,” he says with a laugh.

John Rohrer, 42, a nurse, and married father of a toddler, skated as a child and again as a teenager before picking up the sport again about six months ago.

An avid biker and Hampden resident, Rohrer says that, as a result of the pandemic, the convenience of the skatepark—especially with a baby at home—has turned skating into his current exercise of choice.

“It’s a good core workout, and it’s quick and easy cause it’s right up the street from my house,” Rohrer says. “I’ve done a lot cycling my whole life, but a lot of fun bike rides, for me, take a lot longer. So this is a lot more conducive to get my activity itch scratched, and it reminds me of being a kid, I guess.”

Rohrer’s not too interested in pursuing the board flips and grinds associated with street skating. Riding a wider board with larger wheels, he focuses on cruising the skatepark’s banks and maintaining momentum over obstacles because he enjoys the speed.

“The park is a lot different from where I skated in high school so it’s a big learning process,” he says, “and way more balanced than I remember. It’s just really fun to go fast, simply put.”

At the other end of the park, 48-year-old Ben, who asked not to use his last name, skates the park’s “bowl” in near isolation.

The discipline of skating in a bowl dates back to the sport’s early days in the 1970s, when pioneering pushers—particularly in drought-stricken southern California—cruised along the walls of empty swimming pools like surfers riding a concrete wave. Cruising in bowls, however, has taken a backseat to other styles of skating in terms of popularity, particularly street skating.

Ben, who said he first began skating between 1985 and 1991, is one of the few pushers at the park who prefers to coast in the bowl, which is set on an elevated perch above the rest of the park.

He rides a wide board, with a single kicktail, and larger wheels—a style popular in the 1980s when “vert” skating was the sport’s most popular discipline that went out of vogue about the time Ben stopped skating.

Ben, who arrives at the park via white BMW crossover, started skating the bowl in Hampden about three years ago, he says, primarily for the same reason most men his age start getting active again.

“I needed to get exercise, and I didn’t grow up with such a wonderful bowl in my backyard,” says Ben, a Massachusetts native.

If there’s been an increase in the number of guys his age skateboarding since the COVID-19 outbreak, Ben says, he wouldn’t know. He chalked that up to his type of skating, which encourages social distancing by default.

“I skate the bowl. No one [else] skates the bowl,” Ben says. “Everyone’s over on the other side.”

Back on that side of the park, John Shea, 43, is one of the more accomplished skaters among the early arrivers.

Shea is one of the few skaters his age who never dropped the hobby for a prolonged period of time, and it shows in the aggressiveness and speed of his skating.

While dynamic with his feet on the board, Shea will never be accused of being loquacious. He’s friendly, and answers questions, but it’s clear being interviewed makes him uncomfortable.

Still, Shea explains what he wants to accomplish by continuing to skate, and the reticent Catonsville resident may have summed up the goals for all the early-bird skaters: “Just roll around and try not to get hurt.”

Concrete Kids

May 13, 2017
West 36th Street

“Could I ask the elected officials here to raise their hands?” City Councilman Ryan Dorsey says, raising his own hand and glancing toward several fellow councilmen, a pair of state delegates, and Mayor Catherine Pugh, all in attendance this afternoon for the phase II grand opening of Hampden’s Roosevelt Park skate park. “Now, will everyone who has skated in this concrete bowl keep their hand up?”

The only hand still raised, of course, is that of youthful, 35-year-old Dorsey, who was elected to his first term last year. 

Dorsey notes how long it took for the facility to get built—a dozen years—adding with a smile that he decided “it would be easier to run for office” than do the type of behind-the-scenes advocacy, organizing, and fundraising required to bring the 16,000-square-foot, world-class project to completion.

That said, the driving force behind the project works for one of Dorsey’s colleagues. Longtime skater Stephanie Murdock, also 35, serves as legislative director for Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke. “It started when I placed an ad with my personal cellphone number in the back of the City Paper—next to all those ‘interesting’ ads—to gauge support and recruit volunteers,” Murdock recalls. “People began calling me who wanted a skate park.” She founded the nonprofit, 501(c)3 Skatepark of Baltimore in 2007. 

In the past, says Northeast Baltimore native Spencer Brown, 28, skaters often jumped on the light rail, getting off near the University of Baltimore, Inner Harbor, or Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, looking for “a good place to grind” on ramps, stairs, ledges, boxes, and pipes.

“This brings in people from Maryland, D.C., Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and there are going to be professional teams coming in the next few weeks for competitions,” says Brown, who is sponsored by Hampden’s Vú Skate Shop and several other skateboard-oriented businesses. “The big thing is that the perception of skating, because of this project, has changed in recent years. 

“There’s acceptance now.”

Table Scraps

May 15, 2017
Inner Harbor

Since 2014, Mr. Trash Wheel, the Inner Harbor’s water-and-solar-powered, garbage-devouring device, has pulled 1.1 million pounds of debris from the harbor—including nearly a half-million polystyrene containers, more than 650,000 snack and grocery bags, nearly 400,000 plastic bottles, and more than 9 million cigarette butts.

“He also gets a lot of baseballs and soccer balls, and random stuff, including beer koozies, a beer keg, a motorcycle helmet, pink flamingos—once a lost, 5-foot python,” says Cy Kellett, who helped build the prototype with his uncle John Kellett, Mr. Trash Wheel’s inventor.

Situated near where the Jones Falls flows into the Inner Harbor, the beloved Mr. Trash Wheel—a viral video showing him in action garnered nearly 1.5 million views, and he’s been profiled by the likes of CNN, NBC News, and National Geographic—is celebrating his birthday today. Along with staff from the Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative and a dozen or so local fans, the party this afternoon includes students from Commodore John Rodgers Elementary School, who have brought a “cake” (a used tire filled with plastic bottles and junk) to feed to Mr. Trash Wheel.

After the desserts are served, including actual cupcakes for the kids, Adam Lundquist, director of the Healthy Harbor Initiative, and Jonathan Jensen, on guitar and ukulele, respectively, lead the students and crowd in song. First there’s a rendition of “Happy Birthday” and then an homage to Mr. Trash Wheel, penned by Jensen, whose full-time job is as a bassist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Scooping up the yutz and the cigarette butts
Up to 25 tons a day
Mr. Trash Wheel, Mr. Trash Wheel, Mr. Trash Wheel
He’s the hero of the harbor

 “The world premiere of ‘Hero of the Harbor’ was last month at Peabody Heights Brewery,” Jensen grins. “For their launch of Mr. Trash Wheel’s Lost Python Ale.”

Statue of Liberty

May 16, 2017
North Charles Street

On May 17, 1917, nearly a century after the Marquis de Lafayette’s last visit to Baltimore, city leaders and a French delegation broke ground for a statue of the American Revolutionary War hero in Mount Vernon Square. The effort to memorialize the wildly popular Lafayette in Baltimore—a downtown city street had already been named in his honor—was meant to symbolize the important bond between the two countries as the U.S. entered World War I. 

“Fifty-thousand residents of Baltimore turned out for the groundbreaking,” Robert Dalessandro, chairman of the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission, reminds a smaller but still enthusiastic crowd gathered in Mount Vernon Square to mark the 100th anniversary of the groundbreaking. Behind Dalessandro and the statue—and in front of Baltimore’s towering monument to George Washington—two 30-foot American and French flags blow in the wind. 

Lafayette’s first visit to Baltimore came in 1781, when the dashing officer and his soldiers camped near here before heading further south. His second visit came in 1784 and his third in 1824, according to the Baltimore Sun, when the 67-year-old was greeted by celebratory cannon fire at Fort McHenry and a parade of ships. 

It’s hard to overstate the courageous, freedom-fighting Lafayette’s hold on the American imagination, which continued long after his death. Dalessandro notes that when American troops first arrived in France in 1917, Col. C.E. Stanton, an aide to Gen. John J. Pershing, was said to have uttered: “Lafayette, we are here!”

After the ceremony, Michel Charbonnier, consul general of France at the French Embassy in Washington, is asked by an attendee about the French reaction to the election of President Donald Trump amid the administration’s early controversies. 

“The French people have been interested in American politics for more than two centuries,” Charbonnier says with a diplomatic smile, alluding to Lafayette’s mission. “Not that we have always understood it.”