It’s a Tuesday afternoon, the warm evening sun peering out behind a canopy of oak trees. Someone hands me a cold beer from one of the many coolers scattered around the court. A discordant array of ’90s dad rock and golden-era hip-hop drowns out the sounds of grinding metal and aging bodies hitting the concrete. I dodge one of the “Old Man Night” regulars careening across the cracked green basketball court, originally donated by Chris Paul III (CP3), just in time to catch a kid in painted Vans landing a new trick on one of the hobbled DIY ledges held together by little more than luck.
At each corner of the CP3 skatepark, located next to Burke Playground in the Irish Channel, a different collection of regular and new faces populate the space. On the flat, a few teens wearing JNCO jeans take turns recording clips for their Instagram story. Across the court, there’s a lively debate about the new obstacle one of the guys is building. Everyone here is moving at their own pace, and it’s some of the best skating I have ever seen: The grom—skater slang for a young skater—who left school early trying to land a trick before curfew; the older guys silently wincing as they sit down, feeling an accumulation of Tuesdays in their knees; and the collective patience as we wait for the day the City finally decides this spot isn’t welcome in the neighborhood anymore. This is skating—messy, rebellious, and profoundly communal. It is also fleeting—our skating days numbered by both our bodies and the vulnerability of marginal spaces.
Skating lives somewhere between art and sport: It isn’t about fame or scoring points but rather self-expression. Skating is different for everyone: For some, it’s exercise; for others, rehab. And for almost all of us, it’s changed the way we navigate the world. The moment you step on a skateboard, the excitement pulls you in and suddenly the boring backdrop of concrete walls and sidewalks becomes a frontier of opportunity, your body a new medium of expression. Long drives stuck in traffic become treasure hunts for spots, and otherwise mundane concrete becomes a canvas.
On the surface, it isn’t obvious that skateboarding is flourishing in New Orleans. The impact the New Orleans cityscape has on skateboarding, however, is profound. Instead of smooth plazas seemingly made for skateboarding like those found in L.A. or Barcelona, New Orleans skating thrives in broken places, like the chunked-out red ledges of Crescent Park (Piety Wharf) and the various handrails, stairsets, and manual pads scattered around the city.
To Philly Santosuosso, lifelong New Orleans skateboarder and owner of Humidity Skateshop, New Orleans’ “lack of spots and rough landscape” isn’t a disadvantage. It gives him a “perception of spots I might not otherwise have.” New Orleans skateboarding is jazzy and fluid from navigating all the cracks and strewn pebbles, yet it demands power to surmount formidable infrastructure. Our ledges are tall and rough, stairs never seem to have good landings, and our rails warp over time, resulting in styles built on confidence rather than convenience. The same landscape that routinely floods due to poor infrastructure gives life to a style of skateboarding not found anywhere else in the country. Not inspired by the West Coast surf culture nor urban enough for the East Coast, our skating is unmistakable. It’s a lived grit that reflects in each pop of a tail. What we lack in spots, we make up for in ingenuity.
“We have always had DIYs popping up,” explains Santosuosso. In the old days, there were spots like Sunbasket and Belle Promenade on the Westbank. “There was a lot of good skating in those days before Katrina. Belle Promenade rode for a long time before getting destroyed, and most of the wooden spots got taken down by the storm,” Santosuosso says. After Katrina, many New Orleans skaters began building sturdier concrete obstacles and, as he puts it, “transitional DIY spaces.” These include the concrete quarter pipes at the abandoned Shell station and the long-standing Needle Point DIY—named for the needles scattered on the ground.
In an approach emblematic of New Orleans’ laissez-faire governance strategies, the City, as Santosuosso describes, “turned a blind eye” to skating, leaving informal spaces to shape the history of skating here. Yet 10 years ago, the local government decided to champion New Orleans’ first public skate space, Parisite Skatepark.
Although not publicly funded, Parisite is open to everyone and widely publicized. Located under the I-610 overpass at Pleasure Street and Paris Avenue (i.e. Paris Site), Parisite was, according to members of the skate community who have been working with the City, supposed to be the fix-all to the plight of the New Orleans skateboarder. Its long, open space makes a great venue for crafty skate obstacles, jams, or flat-ground sessions. It features two bowls—one a large, modified peanut with satisfying grooved coping and the other, a classic pool, tiled with steep transitions. On the other side of the park is a pure concrete section with fun boxes, fly outs, rails—everything you could want.
Unfortunately, as it has aged, Parisite has also become neglected, and its open spaces have become graveyards for run-down obstacles and lazy quarter pipes barely hanging on to the few screws yet to strip. The ground has become cracked, dusty, and harder to skate. Safety has come into question as crime continues to permeate the space (I’ve personally had two firearms pulled on me there in the past three years), all of which are driving more people away.
As Parisite has become less of an everyday option for skaters, they have had to seek alternative spots. Some places feel familiar. The shadeless, split basketball courts known as Hunter’s Field in the 7th Ward still live on in name, but not in orientation. After the wooden ramps were removed and destroyed, the community has instead put small concrete ledges and handmade rails in their place. Five minutes away, a recent concrete pour has turned an ostensibly barren bank on the Lafitte Greenway into an obstacle generating more clips in the city than I have seen in years. The now-popular bank ledge has already hosted dozens of professional skateboarders, including Griffin Gass, Brian Anderson, and local legend Jordan Trahan.
As the sun sinks at CP3, the park fills with a troupe of skaters all there for different purposes, finding common ground at Old Man Night. Jeremey Lavoi, long-time CP3 skateboarder and videographer, describes Old Man Night as “a low-impact skate meet-up for older skaters with jobs and/or kids,” which has become a ritual for Uptown skateboarders. The “core” old men who have built the park are bankers, teachers, tech moguls, and artists, all finding refuge from daily toil in skateboarding. Tuesday nights are a “scheduled time, where we could meet up and not feel any pressure, just have fun,” says Lavoi. To these guys, Old Man Night “represents what skating was to us in the ’90s when it wasn’t such a popular sport, and you kind of knew everybody in the scene.” Sure, it’s skating, but it’s also late-night talks at Parasol’s or New York Pizza, birthdays, deaths, and memories. Obstacles have come and gone, turned to shrapnel by the city. Skaters have drifted through both in place and in life. The ones we have lost are celebrated now in memory and the snapshots that we carry with us—including Geoffrey Dumont, a lifelong New Orleans skateboarder who passed unexpectedly in May of 2024. A year after he passed, everyone gathered at the park for his birthday. Dumont is honored every day with the box that he built for the park: Geoff’s box.
On early Saturday mornings, once a month, a different group claims CP3. The roar of boards flying across the ground is met with a new sound: the laughter of children and the satisfaction of a mother watching her kid first learn how to drop in. Amid controlled chaos, Annie Stallman has helped make CP3 the backdrop for NOLA Skate Club, a free skateboarding camp that teaches and shares skateboarding with children across New Orleans. “Skate Club exists to provide a space for kids who may not otherwise find skateboarding to come and build community. At Skate Club, kids learn how to fall and get back up, support each other’s success, get out of their comfort zones, and get off their devices. The skills they’re building at the club will serve them in all other aspects of life,” says Stallman. Held monthly, the program has grown since its inception, some days drawing over 30 kids, parents, and young adults from all across New Orleans.
Alyssa Maxwell ollie at CP3, April 2021. (Photo by Larry Blossom)
On the Saturdays when there is no Skate Club, a group of “mams” has come together to form M.A.M.s (Middle-Aged Moms) NOLA. Cofounder Allie Anzalone describes M.A.M.s as “exactly who we are—middle-aged skateboarding moms.” Inspired by their children and the lack of women skaters their age, Angela Driscoll, a founding member, adds, “I never had any intention of starting a skate group. I wasn’t seeing many women skaters, especially ones my age. Our daughters were starting to skate together, [so the] group just sort of happened organically.” In skating, falling, and laughing together, these mothers have reignited something that they felt they had lost. Beth Renfro, the third founding member, says, “We’re all just trying to navigate being working moms, juggling kids, and life in general. For a lot of moms, you lose pieces of yourself in your family without even realizing it, so this has become a really fun third space where we can just exist, be ourselves, and do something totally ours.”
From self-proclaimed old men reclaiming the ’90s and children learning to skate for the very first time to a group of mothers remembering what it’s like just to have dumb fun, this park caters to them all. It has become a center for New Orleans skating, honoring the past while breathing new life into its future. As Lavoi puts it, “CP3 is more than a park, or a skate space, or a basketball court, or even a physical space. It’s a community hub. It means something to us. It’s a friendly, welcoming, inclusive environment where anybody can show up and be greeted with a smile, a nod, and feel no pressure to be good, just be cool, respectful, and have fun.”
Larry Blossom backside wallride at CP3, November 2014. (Photo by Chris Boye)
Last March, this space and its community faced their greatest challenge. According to Lavoi, when an unsupervised child was hurt while skating, the parents threatened a lawsuit against the New Orleans Recreation Department (NORD). Suddenly, the fickle freedom of those Tuesday evening and Saturday morning skate sessions were revealed by the threat of bureaucracy. Where New Orleans skateboarding was once limited by its surroundings, its newest hurdle is legitimacy.
The news of the lawsuit spread quickly through the skating community. CP3’s future seemed grim. But working with the Irish Channel Neighborhood Association (ICNA) and other community partners, Lavoi and others began to fight back. In early summer ICNA, skaters, and NORD sought a compromise. As the dust settled, the problem became clear: It wasn’t whether CP3 would exist, but how it would exist.
There were talks about turning the DIY into a full concrete park, but skaters like Lavoi and Santosuosso didn’t want another Parisite. They wanted CP3, a park whose wooden obstacles can be changed and turned into something new the moment they get stale. One CP3 regular chimed in that if this park were destroyed, they would “skate a parking lot or build a small ramp in a backyard to avoid dealing with the city.” Where it stands, the Old Men want to work with the City, to make something permanent or at least legal. When I asked Annie Stallman what she thought about the potential of losing CP3, she simply said, “Skaters will build another park, but I am not sure we’ll be able to build another CP3.”
Baby shower for Tim Black a.k.a. Diaper Jam, July 2019. (Photo courtesy Old Man Night Club).
In June of 2025, according to Lavoi, the City unexpectedly proposed that the skaters themselves assume responsibility for the space. Lavoi described the situation as “a liability issue” where the City “sought the skate community to form a company [and] sign a cooperative agreement (CEA) with the City, leaving the skaters to bear the burden of insuring the public park,” bringing the issue to where it is now.
What lives at CP3 is not its obstacles—it’s the moms, the bankers, and the groms who incessantly show up, without any guarantee the spot will still be there tomorrow. It is an intergenerational reminder that individuality transcends age. It is a place where freedom is born and where it learns to let go—from the kids finding themselves in the four polyurethane wheels of their boards to the older generation feeling each trick in their bones, and to CP3 taking ownership of itself. At CP3, we are constantly reminded that what is gained can quickly be lost. Ours and CP3’s silent struggle isn’t against the City, it’s against time.
The author at CP3, December 2023. (Photo by Briggs Clinard)
For more info on NOLA Skate Club and M.A.M.s NOLA, check out @nolaskateclub and @mamsnola on Instagram.
Top photo: Philly Santosuosso at CP3, January 2023 (photo by Todd Taylor)
