Nike SB | Skate Safari Barge

Bringing NYC's Lost Skate Spots Back to Life

Our Opportunity

For Go Skateboarding Day in New York City, Nike SB gave us a deceptively simple challenge:

Create something only Nike could do.

But celebrating skateboarding in New York presented another challenge. The city's skate culture has never belonged to one neighborhood or one park. It was built across boroughs, on sidewalks, plazas, ledges and improvised street spots discovered and claimed by generations of skaters.

Many of the places that became legendary within that history no longer existed.

So rather than create another skate event and ask the city to come to us, we decided to take skateboarding back to the city.

And bring a little of its history with us.

Our Solution

We built a skate park on a barge.

Then we sent it around New York City.

For an entire long weekend, the Nike SB Skate Safari Barge traveled from borough to borough, creating a moving Go Skateboarding Day celebration that gave young skaters across NYC the opportunity to experience it in their own communities.

But this wasn't just any skate park.

We looked to New York's rich history of street skating and rebuilt some of the city's most iconic skate spots that had disappeared over time, recreating legendary obstacles on the deck of the barge.

Places the previous generation had made famous could suddenly be skated again.

For younger skaters who knew these spots only through old videos, photographs and stories, the barge transformed a piece of NYC skate history into something they could actually ride.

Each stop was connected back to the neighborhood through local skate shops, which became gateways into the experience by helping promote the event and register skaters. Nike SB athletes joined local kids on the barge, collapsing the distance between the skaters they'd grown up watching and the community coming up behind them.

What started as Go Skateboarding Day became an entire weekend-long journey through the city.

No permanent park.

No single destination.

Just New York skateboarding, floating through New York.

Our Outcome

Across a long weekend, Skate Safari transformed a single-day celebration into a citywide experience.

By moving through the boroughs instead of asking skaters to travel to one centralized event, Nike SB created something accessible to communities across NYC while supporting the neighborhood skate shops already at the center of them.

Nike's professional skate team shared the same obstacles with local kids. Neighborhood retailers became part of the experience. And a new generation got the chance to skate pieces of New York history that had disappeared before many of them ever picked up a board.

The result was more than a floating skate park.

It was a celebration of the city that made street skating what it is, the places that shaped its history and the kids who would shape what came next.

We couldn't bring the old New York back.

So we put it on a barge and brought it to them.