The park belongs to everybody. That’s the overriding theme of a short documentary shot by a pair of Bushwick skateboarders that celebrates a concrete pump track that was emerged, somewhat mysteriously, at the center of Maria Hernandez Park last summer and has remained there in the months since. In a lot of ways, it both reoriented and reinvigorated the park, after much of it had been closed off for a extensive re-turfing. Under the summer sun, kids from nearby schools wait in line to try their luck on the board in a moving ritual torn from the last century of adolescence.    

“I don’t know if it’s factual or not, but supposedly the pump track has been moved around the city a few places, I think it was in Coney Island [last] and it just wasn’t being used there,” says Matt L. Rohrer, a bespeckled psychotherapist by day who skates and writes for skate magazines by night, and who shot the nearly nine-minute clip with his friend Charlie Turner. (Rohrer is also the author, most recently, of My War, “a memoir of growing up punk in a California sliver of light and sea.”) It’s Rohrer’s face that appears throughout, interviewing the assorted strangers drawn in by the lure of the pump track. 

“Somebody, like, did a front flip off the side of it. That was definitely the gnarliest,” says one.