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In addition to hundreds of black-and-white and color photos, We Skate Hardcore includes a DVD with footage of the skaters featured in the book. 
Introduction by Vincent Cianni In 1992 I moved to a loft in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, New York. That year, on my way home from work, I often passed by the Southside in Williamsburg to stop at Hector’s tacqueria on Bedford Avenue near Grand Street. I was enamored by the vitality, sounds, and smells of the streets in the Latino neighborhood. By November 1993 I had found a place to live and work just around the corner from Hector’s. I hired Beto, whose mother owned the video store across the street, and his friend Angel to help me carry furniture up to my second-floor loft in a former warehouse building. For the first year I concentrated on fixing up the raw space. Hector’s, the bakery, and the corner bodega on the other end of the block became central to my daily life and the focus of my attempts to speak more Spanish. During a warm break in the weather in the fall of 1994 I began going to McCarren Park, drawn by the neighborhood activities and games played on the park’s soccer and baseball fields, on its track and handball courts. The park is the largest in the neighborhood, some three blocks of open green space bustling with energy. Young men smash handballs against cement walls, kick soccer balls with the grace of dancers and strength of weightlifters, and hit and catch baseballs with intense determination, wearing uniforms of their own design. Families gather on weekends to picnic and barbecue, particularly on holidays and Puerto Rican day celebrations. Shrieks and yells for outstanding plays or defeated attempts as well as salsa music permeate the air, mixing with the smell of cuchifrito or rice and beans. I began making portraits of teenagers playing ball in McCarren and the other parks, in schoolyards, and on the streets and sidewalks of the Southside. The Southside’s boundaries create a neighborhood of seven square blocks with distinct borders—the East River to the west, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) to the east, and Metropolitan Avenue and Broadway to the north and south, respectively. Built by Robert Moses in 1954, the BQE effectively cut the neighborhood in two. The Williamsburg Bridge, spanning the East River, connects the Southside to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. During the 1990s, the Bridge was, like the neighborhoods around it, gritty and often dangerous, until renovations were completed in 2002. Over the years Williamsburg’s waterfront has decayed, leaving behind underutilized and abandoned industrial buildings that were once the sources of the neighborhood’s wealth and culture. Inside the Southside, life unfolds in an ever-changing but always familiar urban landscape. A predominately Hispanic neighborhood, it is a somewhat isolated environment, protected by its well-defined geographic and cultural boundaries. Yet because of its easy accessibility to Manhattan, the Southside has the same social ills and problems of the greater city surrounding it. In this environment of violence, drugs, and urban blight, there are also strong social, religious, and family structures, and the kids who grow up here share a peculiar blend of street smarts and innocence influenced in equal part by popular culture and ethnic identity. I was photographing a group of young in-line skaters on the street and in a vacant lot on the East River. They had constructed an impressive set of ramps, pipes, and slides on which they practiced every day. Some weeks later I returned, and they were gone. A developer had purchased the land and fenced it in to prevent the skaters from using his property. A few months later I saw Anthony, who had helped build the skate park. He was on his way to a tattoo parlor; I went with him. When I mentioned that I hadn’t seen the skaters, he said they were now at Marcy Avenue under the BQE and he would take me there that afternoon. On the way, Anthony noticed Giselle, five years his junior, walking with her friend Vivien. He stopped to ask her for a date, smoothly maneuvering her toward a fence. Instinctively, I photographed them while Vivien waited impatiently in the background; I immediately recognized how the camera’s spontaneity and capacity to tell stories intimately would change how I photographed. The skaters’ new park under the elevated highway followed the fate of the one by the East River when neighbors on the “other side” of Williamsburg complained to the city. Sanitation trucks came, and workers tore down and carted off the ramps and slides. The skaters were not defeated; skating was their only way to escape from drugs and the street. They went from vacant lots to abandoned buildings constructing skate parks from scrap material. Their parks existed only until vandals destroyed them or sanitation trucks disposed of the ramps and pipes, or property owners evicted them from their run-down warehouses. I followed them to the BQE, to P.S. 84, and then to an abandoned building on the East River. They were making their own photographs and videotapes “to enhance their technique,” and all the while they were organizing local in-line skating, skateboarding, and BMX competitions, and drawing up plans for a skate park to present to the community board. Richie, Uly, Dean, Eddie, Mike R., and some of the other skaters would stop by my place to look at pictures I had made of them and to show me pictures and videos that they had made of themselves for sponsors and competitions. I began to interview and videotape them to document their lives more fully, and I asked them to write about their lives on my photographs. The bladers would come by and stay into the evening; I would make dinner while they wrote, made music with their hands, voices, whatever was lying around, and told stories of their recent accomplishments “pulling new tricks.” They also talked about their efforts before the community board, which continually rejected their proposals for a skate park. They recognized their strengths and had their own dreams of success: to get sponsored by an in-line skate manufacturing company and turn pro; or to have a family, a house, a career, an office in Manhattan. They were aware of the obstacles that might prevent them from attaining the goals they desired; they were very honest and realistic about the neighborhood and their lives. Their words made perfect sense and enlightened me about my own life as I grew to understand their commitments, rites of passage, mistakes, and successes. By 2000 the group was breaking up: Mike R. took a job with the Metropolitan Transit Authority; Mike M. was attending cooking school; Stephen was still working at the nail salon; Eddie moved to upstate New York and back again; Anthony was working as a subcontractor installing windows in Queens; Emilio, Jesus, and Victor had moved to Florida; and Richie was skating competitively. He and his wife, Pam, were living in Queens with their baby. Uly joined the army in 2001. The year before I had spent Thanksgiving with him. He and Dee had cooked dinner for his father, his mother and her husband, and for Dee’s daughter, Nikki. And for me. I had become part of the family. In February 2003 Uly called me from Hunter Army Airfield at Fort Stewart in Savannah, Georgia. He seemed older, more mature, and there was a sense of urgency in his voice. It was as if we were talking for the last time. I called him the next day to make plans to see him the weekend before he left for Kuwait. What began as an interest in a group of kids trying to grow up in the Southside, relatively unscathed, with a passion for skating, grew into lasting friendships. We don’t see as much of each other as we did; the “gang” has dispersed, moved away, gotten jobs, started families, gone to school. Richie, now one of the top U.S. skaters, lives in California with Pam, and their son, Johanny, managing an X-treme sports camp. Uly is still in the army, after serving in the Middle East, fighting the U.S. government’s war against Iraq. Emilio stops by when he’s visiting the Southside. I see Mike R., Mike M., and Mike O. occasionally on their way home from work. Eddie will call from time to time to see how things are going. I think about when I met all the skaters who appear in this book. They were kids on the street, blading in large groups, congregating in vacant lots, neighborhood parks, sidewalks, macadam schoolyards—anywhere they could skate. They had their dreams, their plans; they had their lives ahead of them. Vincent Cianni began photographing the Southside of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1994. He teaches photography at Parsons School of Design and at photography workshops throughout New York and the United States. See: http://www.vincentcianni.com Interview
from We Skate Hardcore
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