Andy Kessler was admired by skateboarders for his grit and his park designs.
(Tcolla via AP/File 2007)
Andy Kessler, 48; skateboard icon designed parks
Andy Kessler was admired by skateboarders for his grit and his park designs.
(Tcolla via AP/File 2007)
NEW YORK - Andy Kessler, a trailblazer during New York City’s nascent 1970s skateboarding scene and a designer of skate parks who was admired by boarders on both coasts, died Aug. 10. He was 48.
Mr. Kessler died after suffering a heart attack following an allergic reaction to a wasp sting, said Moose Huerta, a close friend and fellow skateboarder.
He was dismantling old wood on a shack in Montauk, Long Island, when he was stung, said Tony Farmer, a skateboarding friend who lives in Brooklyn.
Mr. Kessler got his start in the 1970s with a loose-knit group of skateboarders and graffiti artists known as the Soul Artists of Zoo York. They skated all over Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where Mr. Kessler lived. Central Park’s Bandshell was a favorite spot.
In the 1990s, Mr. Kessler persuaded the city’s Parks Department to build a skateboard facility in Riverside Park, near the Hudson. He went on to design other skate parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Montauk.
At the time of his death, he was trying to update the Montauk skate park he had designed about a decade ago, Huerta said.
Mr. Kessler also developed a zeal for surfing in the past decade.
“The two groups are completely different from each other,’’ he said. “But the level of friends, and how he transcended age and demographics with the people he touched, was amazing.’’
Mr. Kessler had no health insurance in 2005 when he took a spill on his board and dislocated his femur. When he was unable to pay a $51,000 medical bill, several dozen surfers, skaters, and artists - Julian Schnabel, Mickey Eskimo, Zephyr, and Wes Humpston reportedly among them - helped raise the money with a benefit party, Farmer said.
When he healed from the injury, he hopped back on his board, Farmer said.
“Flowing through traffic, timing lights, shooting reds, dodging pedestrians . . . dude just had the streets so wired,’’ Farmer said. “Suffice to say, he was an amazing cat.’’
Huerta, who was too young to have skated with Mr. Kessler during the early days, said the sport started as “a counterculture activity’’ but never carried the cachet that California skateboarding did. But Mr. Kessler didn’t care.
“He did it out of love,’’ he said. “He didn’t receive anything out of it. It spoke to him.’’
In 2008, Mr. Kessler was featured in a documentary, “From Deathbowl to Downtown: The Evolution of Skateboarding in New York.’’ The producers, NCP Films, described it as “an anthropological overview of skating’s epochal shift from the parks and pools of the ’70s, to ramp skating in the ’80s, to the street ascendancy of the 1990s as seen from a New York-centric perspective.
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