The Renegade Skate-Ramp Builders of New York
Pat Smith mixing concrete for a quarter-pipe at Mosquito Beach while Max Lockhart, a skater, looks on. Photo: Daniel Karel On a balmy July evening, Pat Smith, a professional carpenter and the owner of CODA Skateboards, was loading up his jet-black Ram ProMaster cargo van in the driveway of a Greenpoint fabrication shop. Inside the van, he’d hoisted around eight dusty bags of concrete, a stack of dirty buckets, two crusty shovels, a generator, and a portable concrete mixer. Smith, 50, was on his way to work on a public secret in the city’s skateboarding scene: an elaborate, unsanctioned...