There are classic urban fields, courts and natural skateparks all around us. Here, sports evolved and legends earned their name.

Check out the best urban street sport spots, courts and lots.

Basketball – Barry Farm, Washington, DC

Unlike football or hockey, basketball is a true street sport. All you need is a single ball, a hoop and enough guys to get a game going. Solid street courts with high levels of competition are sprinkled across the country, as seen in our Best Streetball Courts feature.

Barry Farm, however, is where the best players call home. Barry Farm is located in the nation’s capitol, and the ballers here don’t often call fouls. The refs only show up for when the George Goodman League takes over for two months every summer.

Stickball – The Streets of the Bronx

So much of America’s sporting heritage has it’s roots in New York. Stickball, a street version of baseball, played with a rubber ball and broomstick, utilizes cars, walls, fences, fire hydrants and anything else that can get in the way.

Stickball first appeared on the streets of NYC in the early 20th century. Although it’s not as popular today, the sport is still played in the outer boroughs, in the shadows of the new billion-dollar stadiums.

Soccer – Times Square, NYC

Soccer may have been invented in the English countryside, but the sport has since gone worldwide, played everywhere from the slums of Rio to the monasteries of Tibet to even Times Square in NYC.

Earlier this year, Street Soccer held its annual championship under the flashing lights and huggable super heroes of busy Times Square. Zimbabwe won, proving soccer really is an international sport.

Skateboarding – Del Mar, California

You can’t skate without the street, and no street is more essential in skate history than the asphalt of Del Mar, California. Skateboarding emerged from SoCal surf culture when surfers started screwing roller skate wheels to the bottom of planks in the 50s.

Nearly two decades later, skateboarding came into its own at a skate competition in a breezy affluent beach town. It was the 1975 Del Mar Nationals, and it was a first glance at things to come. Southern California continues to be a hub of stylish skate activity.

Parkour – London

Parkour is a street sport and London is the city of never-ending streets. The sport didn’t catch on until 2003 with the release of the documentary, Jump London. London is one big free running playground.

From the huge stairs at Wembly Park, to the diving kong tabletops at The Furness, to the various obstacles at Vauxhall Walls – London really does provide infinite lines. Some sports require an entire city to perform, and Parkour is one of them.

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But you also need them to be configured in just the right way, and not in a place that is choked with crowds, like most of the downtown areas where plazas holding these obstacles exist. While skaters will always find a place to shred, these perfect conditions come together only rarely.

On these rare occasions, city planners or school designers build a landscape so well-suited to skating that skaters themselves might never have dreamed it up. Here are seven of the most famous skate spots ever to grace the sport of skateboarding.

Brooklyn Banks

What skate spot could be more classic than the Brooklyn Banks? Located underneath the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, the banks are a hidden and forlorn corner of the city, loved by skaters and unknown to everyone else.

It was a perfect accident of civic architecture that created this three-block long expanse of smooth red bricks, complete with a perfectly-banked wall of varying heights, wallride spots, stairs and handrails.

The best skatepark designers could hardly have done a better job. The banks have nourished generations of East Coast skaters whose cities are often lacking for prime skate spots.

Skaters have had to fight, though, to keep the place safe from demolition. They’ve been successful for the most part, but Brooklyn Banks is currently off-limits to skaters while it undergoes a four-year hibernation period so the city can renovate and repaint the bridge.

Love Park

Love park, in Center City, Philadelphia—known for its iconic LOVE scultpture —couldn’t have been better designed for skateboarding. It’s circular construction makes it ideally suited to long lines, and skaters can make use of every staple of street skating obstacle, all made of smooth granite.

There are ledges short and tall, ledges going off of stairs, benches, manual pads, handrails and more. The granite tiles can also be pried up and propped up to make launch ramps.

This compilation of skateable obstacles has made LOVE a skating haven for decades, and as skaters make increasingly creative use of its resources, it has kept up with the evolution of skateboarding.

The main event at the spot, of course, lies at its center: a water fountain surrounded by four long steps, perfect for huge tricks that land in the fountain’s smooth basin.

Burnside Skatepark

Today one of the most recognizable concrete skate parks in the U.S. started as a forsaken coincidence of urban infrastructure. The space underneath the east end of Portland’s Burnside Bridge was out of the way, dirty and forgotten until skaters started building concrete ramps that made the bridge pilings into walls of ad hoc vert ramps.

Eventually, skaters got permission from the city to let their skatepark persist and Burnside’s ramps, bowls, hips and pyramids have only gotten better and better. Skaters who grow up at Burnside learn to skate fast, air big and shred over rough spots and uneven coping.

Lockwood School

Southern California schools are not just centers of academic education, but training centers for generations of skateboarders who have learned their craft at the school grounds. 

At the Lockwood School, the region’s vastness has allowed the building of untold acres of smooth blacktop, equipped with plastic-covered benches and picnic tables, well-suited for grinding and sliding, and ready to be stacked and arranged any which way.

But even better, school architects often built smooth banks at the schoolyard’s edges so that errant basketballs and volleyballs would roll back to playing children.

Of all these SoCal school skate sports, Lockwood Elementary School has held a special place in the annals of the sport, featured heavily in classic skate movies such as Girl and Chocolate’s 1996 “Mouse.”

Hubba Hideout

Demolished by the city of San Francisco two years ago, Hubba Hideout will always remembered as a simple but impactful place that played a major role in the progression of skating.

It’s construction was simple: a set of six stairs flanked by enormous ledges descending at a gentle angle.

The obstacles helped skaters push the limits of ledge height and the tricks that could be done on them. This forced a marriage of technical ledge tricks and daring attempts at big air maneuvers.

Venice Pit

Another famous skate spot long demolished by city leaders – The Pit played an enormous role in the explosion of ledge skating through the 1990s.

The enclosed pavilion on the sand in Venice Beach was covered in an ever-changing layer of florid graffiti and frequented by only skaters and vagrants.

By its last days, the edges of the concrete tables and benches were extremely rounded from years of heavy grinding. It can be hard to see in videos, but the pit’s tight corners made performing lines extra difficult.

Los Angeles High School

Yet another unwittingly perfect creation from Los Angeles Unified School District – this spot holds a place in the street skating hall of fame. The attractions here are the banked planters covered in small, smooth tiles.

The rapid-fire sound of the skateboard wheels rolling over the tiles only adds to this skate spot’s magic.

The famous banks aren’t the biggest, and the stairs and handrail aren’t the tallest, but the overall aura of the orange banks, the smooth tiles and the opportunity for lines that include the banks and the rail make this spot one of the greatest of all time.

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