Save and Destroy: Preserving S.F.'s Skateboarding Legacy at the Embarcadero

When the Embarcadero Plaza was completed in 1971, San Francisco didn’t realize it had accidentally created a radical skatepark. Originally envisioned as a grand public square that would mark the end of Market Street, the plaza ended up a hub for skaters that turned the stairs, blocks and fountain into a laboratory for new tricks. By the early 1990s, “EMB” was the most famous skate spot on earth.

It’s impossible to imagine modern skateboarding without it. The plaza played a central role in moving skateboarding toward technical, street and ledge-centered skateboarding from the ramps and bowls that dominated the culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Today skateboarders are as vital to urban life as traffic and street fairs – a legacy that the plaza’s red bricks helped author.

That heritage is now under threat. As part of a new redevelopment plan, the city is planning to demolish the Vaillancourt Fountain and transform Embarcadero Plaza into a new park. How should San Francisco preserve a piece of its living history so future generations of skaters can see where they came from?

Conor Dougherty, a skateboarder and reporter at The New York Times, will host a conversation with Ted Barrow, host of Thrasher Magazine's "This Old Ledge" and a leader of the drive to preserve EMB’s legacy, along with , a filmmaker and photographer, whose forthcoming book, EPICENTER documents the EMB skate scene in the early 1990s, and Ashley Rehfeld, a skateboarding strategist and advocate who has helped create skate spaces across the city, including the recent redesign of United Nations Plaza.

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