Tyshawn Jones’s jaw-dropping athleticism has made him a skateboarding icon. But is skateboarding big enough for someone like Tyshawn Jones?
By Willy Staley
Photographs by Philip Montgomery
Videos by Danilo Parra and Zach Sky
One of Tyshawn Jones’s favorite places to skate is the William F. Passannante Ballfield in Greenwich Village. Even by skateboarding’s flexible standards, this park is barren: a flat expanse of asphalt with paint denoting a baseball diamond. There are no ledges sweaty with wax, no stairs to jump down, not even a measly curb; once you leave the painted infield, the ground becomes too chunky to really skate on. And yet it’s still a destination in New York, known to locals as ‘‘T.F. West’’ — short for ‘‘training facility,’’ a convoluted inside joke about the fact that there’s nothing to skate there.
Photo credit: Philip Montgomery for The New York Times