Shredding It
Skateboarding was a big part of college life for photographer Kathy Hayes. At first, it served as a mode of transportation through New York City’s concrete jungle and from one to another of her school’s scattered midtown buildings. It then evolved into a pick-up sport that, before small towns had their own skateparks, found arenas wherever there were hard, curved and banked surfaces.
One popular point of assembly for her cohort was the now-legendary Brooklyn Banks, under the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge—a landscape of brick and concrete that once resonated with the sounds of skateboarding mixed with the music of the Beastie Boys played through an old-fashioned boom box.
A youthful diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis in Hayes’ knee, one of a skateboarder’s most important tools, curtailed her “skating” career for many years. A decade later, helped by multiple surgeries and new medications and inspired by people who were still skating as they approached middle age, she picked up where she had left off. “I was watching friends even in their 50s still shredding,” she says, using the enthusiast’s term for determined, skillful skateboarding. “So I dusted off my board and started to skate
