On The Road
A Requiem For Barriers DIY
You see, the plan was, to build a straight shot from 89 and Route 7 to the downtown lakefront here in the Queen City. So Construction on the Champlain Parkway began but then just as quickly halted in the nineties, for a number of boring reasons. The result was the sudden presence of a thousand foot stretch of road between Pine St. and Home Avenue that was blocked off and more or less forgotten by the authorities who had created it. This stunted highway became a surreal space in the midst of Vermont’s largest city. As the trees and bushes grew back in on the shoulders and the road was ignored, it began to feel like some vision of a fallen world. Soon just hopping the small concrete dividers and skating down it's empty lanes into the arching treeline was like micro-dosing the apocalypse.
When the project was halted indefinitely, skateboarders who had already had their hobby banned by city ordinance suddenly found refuge in the space. Burlington had no skatepark at the time (the first wouldn’t arrive till 2000) but skateboarders had no intention of stopping, because of that or the law. Skating doesn’t need parks, it’s a wild animal, but it is nice to have a space where all the hangups of the square-world cease at the boundaries and you’re left alone to do what you want.
So, Burlington skaters commandeered the abandoned road and for the next three decades built, skated and escaped upon it. Raising money and carrying in the concrete, they built transition upon the barriers that made up the median. They created slappy curbs, speed humps, launch ramps and many other features. Learning and refining as they went.
It’s hard to quantify the value of having this type of area now. Or maybe it’s easy and it just depends on your definition of value. They all talk about “third spaces” now because these spaces are in decline. You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.
A third space is a place outside of just work (or school) and home where people can gather, spend time together, interact and share ideas. Like churches, bars, coffee shops, community centers, libraries, parks, etc.
Some require you spend money to participate in the scene while others are just open to the general public. Either way, they’ve all been disappearing rapidly in America lately due to a number of reasons like gentrification, internet isolation, and the government’s response to the Covid pandemic which drove many out of business.1
Those are third spaces, but what is it, though, when people, individually and collectively, take an unused, abandoned area and without permission or assistance from any authority, begin to use that space creatively and communally? Is this just a more radical third space or something else?
First, it might just be sweeping the dirt and debris from a ride-able surface, clearing the overgrowth, patching the cracks or hauling away trash. Then, it’s building a small quarter pipe, or transition onto the barriers, or a series of curbs to ride. Skate spots that exist away from the the cops and the Karens that had kept you roaming; a hidden sanctuary to hang out and skate until its too dark to see. But also not limited by regulations, budgets, politics and even the hierarchy of expertise, the way a sanctioned park is.
DIYs reflect the power of the community’s collective imagination. The power to use that part of our brain that is the strongest when we’re children and say “what if you could build this, this would be sick.”
The result is that these spaces organically engage in an actual, functioning, purely democratic, or even anarchist, community. No one is asking for permission to be there but they are seeking voluntary participation from the community that has arisen from the use of the space in all projects, upkeep, cleaning and rule enforcement. It’s entirely an education in direct action. As David Graeber once put it: “You don’t beg the state to dig you a well when you see people thirsty, you dig the well and dare them to stop you.”
Like most DIYs, where creating a stateless park and skating it turns a neglected terrain into something rad, the artists followed (or as in a lot of cases, the skaters and artists were one and the same). Soon there were tags, murals and messages on everything at the Barriers. Even the tar of the road became a canvas, which only increased the psychedelic, magical, Alice in Wonderland feeling you got upon entering this spot.
At its best, it’s an expression of the human spirit’s boundless creativity and proclivity towards joy. Not blissed-out ecstatic joy but just the simple, natural joy of being with friends, losing yourself in your craft and escaping the gaze of a society that is tirelessly pursuing the extreme commodification of all aspects of existence.
Every DIY is also built upon understanding of the old Taoist/Buddhist teaching that everything is transitory, nothing will last. So new graffiti replaces old graffiti, early fixtures are taken out or built upon, and eventually, most likely, the man will inevitably come and tear the whole thing down.
When the world finally stopped for a time and it felt like we might be entering that post-apocalypse world they keep advertising, I went to the Barriers. On early spring mornings in late April and May that year, when up in the mountains there would still be snow on the ground. The spring sunlight then feeling like a hopeful reminder of the approaching summer. Everything in the world outside of these thousand feet of road was uncertain. I left all worries in my car and escaped into the growling vibration of the board beneath me on some of the roughest ground in the northeast. It would gnaw on your wheels and shred your skin. The concrete of the the builds were slick beneath the wheels from decades of graffiti layered over itself. Those mornings were soundtract’d by The Replacements and James Brown.
“Seen your video, Your phony rock n roll!”
“But I say we won’t quit moving till we get what we deserve!”
Those bright spring mornings becoming sweaty summer afternoons where you’d hide under in the shade after skating the same 20 feet of hot tar under a bright sun for hours. Then cool, dark, late afternoons and evenings of autumn, when the forest would explode with color before settling into grey. And eventually, winter would come, the only true authority over the Barriers, shutting down the spot under layers of snow.
I still can see the details of the section of road that led to the small bank that I skated over and over and (really gotta stress this) over. The gashes in the tar that frost or roots had torn, which you had to hit just right to avoid losing speed or getting pitched. The nearby, active streets that became invisible once the plants budded and grew until all the houses to the east were hidden from view. To the point where some days when you were there, the only evidence that the outside world still existed was auditory; the conversations from people on the nearby bike path or the sound of a distant passing train. Otherwise it was Rip Van Winkle. Just skaters of varying ages and crew sizes: filming, swearing, falling, laughing. Only the occasional dog walkers and (increasingly after the pandemic) the homeless people passing through to camps further down in the woods.
In 2015 the city built a million dollar skatepark down the road, which, don’t get me wrong is awesome, but again and again there were many of us who just chose to be here at the Barriers, with only the passing crows or vultures.
In the late summer of 2020 the spot had its Icarus moment, skaters openly hauling in bags of concrete, tools and building a large, freestanding quarter pipe at the end of the barriers section. I won’t be diplomatic about this, it was a fucking beautiful site to behold. It was a skate-able masterpiece, rising up out of the rubble of an abandoned city project, decorated with a beautiful, vibrant mural and giving you a glimpse into how cool things could be if we weren’t always limited by the Jay Fishers of the world.
Because not long after it was erected, Jay Fisher, who lived 200 feet from Barriers (behind the trees) decided that, after seeing the unsanctioned quarter pipe, he’d had enough. He complained to the authorities that, “It sets a dangerous precedent for the city to allow this type of activity to grow to fruition.”
This brought forth other residents (I won’t bother quoting here) who similarly did not see a DIY as some magical fourth space that made productive use out of abandoned lands in the midst of a global pandemic and ongoing opioid epidemic. They saw trash2, they heard noise and they feared the lawlessness.
Instead of the presence of skaters and the DIY community (that yes, cards on the table does tend to party) being seen by these homeowners as something positive that had made this areas more safer and interesting, they saw Barriers as an emblem for all of the societal ills that had been trending upwards since the turn of the century and more rapidly following the pandemic. Homelessness, substance misuse, people presenting with mental illness, even criminal behavior all seemed to be the result of the DIY, according to the statements of these home owners. The free-standing quarter pipe was just the final straw.
There’s a strong argument (which was made to the city by skaters and other citizens) that skateboarding and the presence of Barriers actually deterred much of the unsavory activity the neighbors seemed to be blaming on the park, but this argument did not carry the day. The city tore down the quarter pipe and let all involved know the rest of the park’s days were numbered. This was soon followed by a political effort to jump start the completion of the Champlain Parkway and earlier this month the park was finally ripped out in its entirety. The tar was stripped and resurfaced and only scattered pieces of graffiti-colored rubble remained.
So now, instead of the sounds of laughter and skateboard trucks grinding across concrete and The Replacements singing, they’ll have the locust-hum of passing traffic.
This is a safer precedent to the Jay Fishers of the world than a society where people create for the sake of creation and without asking for permission. Where they defy all authority and go into hidden, neglected spaces to create community and build a small piece of what they actually want out of life.
The story of the Barriers is the age-old story of the tension between security and freedom, how two groups of people can look at the same stretch of road at the same time but see it going to wildly different destinations.
“And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds.” - Kerouac, On The Road
The most unfuckable sacks of shit you’ll ever see on this planet is also a threat to one of the last places in American society where you can go, spend time, use resources, apply for jobs, do research, see people without having to be a consumer. The public library is one of the best and most radical ideas of the modern world and should be defended with the same intensity a feral dog guards its kill.
To be fair there was trash in the buses to varying degrees and it was an ongoing effort to keep picking things up and hauling it out. Some of the trash though was just sculpture or not actually related to the park and had more to do with people looking to party someplace private and in some cases camp indefinitely.
Smile because it happened.