The Unreality of Love Park, Philadelphia

Kevin Buist on the mental map of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video games.

Long before I visited Philadelphia for the first time last year, I had a very vivid mental map of one particular location in the city: Love Park. I grew up skateboarding in the 90s, which meant consuming VHS skate videos, skate magazines, and of course, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video games. Through this (mostly) pre-internet media I became familiar with public plazas in cities I had never visited, as long as they were iconic skate spots like Love Park, the Brooklyn Banks, or San Francisco's Embarcadero Plaza. 

In the grainy skate VHS tapes, Love Park was recognizable by the bright red and blue LOVE sculpture by Robert Indiana, looming in the background while a rowdy crew of locals and visiting pros conquered waxed and decaying granite ledges. To my young eyes it looked dangerous and thrilling, with skaters constantly dodging both cops and junkies. I became even more familiar with the topography of the plaza when it was included in the Philadelphia level of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (2000). While cruising around the crude digital approximation of the plaza on Playstation 1, I had no way of knowing that it would eventually become a memorial to a lost piece of skateboarding history. 

Decades passed and a torn achilles tendon ended my real-life skateboarding exploits for good. Still, when I found myself in Philadelphia on a business trip last year, I needed to visit one of the great pilgrimage sites of skateboarding. When I arrived at Love Park I was shocked to see that the famous ledges, stairs, and empty fountain were all gone. I would have been convinced that I was in the wrong place, but there was Robert Indiana’s garish LOVE sculpture, propped up on an awkward stand in the middle of a completely flat, and apparently new, plaza. A quick Google search confirmed that the old park, along with all the features that made it a skateboarder's Mecca, was completely destroyed in 2016. 

The replacement park is so bland I can hardly think of a way to describe it, even negatively. It’s just a void. It’s not a parking lot, but it may as well be. The LOVE sculpture is still there, but that’s not exactly a unique feature. There are now over 50 Robert Indiana LOVE sculptures around the world, according to Artnet. Even my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan recently got one. It’s… fine.

VIDEO GAMES

MEMORY