Hosted and edited by Farran Golding
Photography by Christian Kerr
When you’re visiting the Lower East Side skatepark (“LES”) in New York, you get familiar with the crash of wheels hitting a metal wallride by the skatepark’s entrance. It’s a racket that finds your ears no matter what pocket of the 20,000 square feet of space you’re in. It’s also one of two noises you hear a lot when you’re skating the park, the other being trains running overhead across the Manhattan Bridge.
After opening on Go Skateboarding Day 2012, the LES skatepark set a precedent for skatepark construction across the boroughs of New York City. Describing it as the “Civic Centre” of NYC’s skate scene, journalist Ian Browning wrote about how it came to be and where skateparks sit within the ecosystem of New York’s Parks Department in a Quartersnacks story on the tenth anniversary of the LES skatepark, published in 2022.
For the first Skate Bylines podcast, Browning shared how the story came together and we explored municipality in New York, how geography factors into locations becoming landmarks landmarks, and the city’s significance to skate culture which grew exponentially over the past decade.
Ian Browning at LES Skatepark, Manhattan New York City, 2022. Christian Kerr
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You can find show notes for everything related to the episode below. We’ve also included a transcript of the Q&A conversation which has been edited for length and clarity.
Timestamps and Shownotes
00:00 — Welcome to Skate Bylines
— “Theme from New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra (1977)
00:46 — Introduction to the episode
2:20 — First visits to LES Skatepark
— Farran and friends at LES in 2016
— NY Skateboarding: Introducing the New Coleman Skatepark (2012)
3:56 — The opening and significance of LES Skatepark
— NY Skateboarding: ‘Steve Rodriguez Introduces the New LES Skatepark’ (2012)
5:24 — The original incarnation of the LES Skatepark
— The original layout of LES Skatepark
— ‘What We Know About The Official Brooklyn Banks Reopening’ — Steve Rodriguez interviewed by Alexis Castro for Jenkem Magazine, 2023
— An early Epicly Later’d with Jason Dill
6:45 — What makes a good skatepark, a good skatepark?
7:55 — Interlude: Gangs of New York
8:24 — History of the Lower East Side neighbourhood
— Low Life: Lures & Snares of Old New York by Lucy Sante (1991)
9:40 — Ian’s story, the idea of a ‘Civic Center’ for skateboarding, and the shared and different purposes of skateparks and street spots
— Tompkins Square Park via the Quartersnacks Spot Map
— ‘An Oral Historial of Tompkins Square Park’ by Alexis Castro • Jenkem Mag (2024)
— ‘The Star Team — An Interview with Kyota Umeki’ by Adam Abada • Quartersnacks (2023)
11:58 — Learning etiquette through environment
12:55 — Comparisons to the Brooklyn Banks and the geography of New York’s historic skateboarding hubs
— ‘Astor Place R.I.P’ • Quartersnacks (2014)
— ‘#TFReport Tompkins Square Park is Saved’ • Quartersnacks (2019)
— Black Hubba, the Courthouse, and the Five Points redevelopment explored by Ted Barrow in Thrasher Magazine’s ‘This Old Ledge’ (2024)
15:00 — New York’s increased significance to in skate culture during the early-to-mid 2010s
— ‘An Interview with Johnny Wilson’ • Quartersnacks (2014)
— “cherry” by William Strobeck for Supreme (2014)
— Static IV by Josh Stewart (2015)
— Epicly Later’d, the series; Epicly Later’d, Patrick O’Dell’s website
— New York City Skate Spots • Quartersnacks
— Bobby Puleo in Staic II by Josh Stewart (2004)
17:54 — Park space in New York City and the genesis of Ian’s Quartersnacks story on LES Skatepark
19:42 — Communicating with the Parks Department and meeting Nestor
— ‘Adams demands ‘discipline of message’ to combat ‘gotcha’ press corps, audio reveals • Politico (2022)
— Christian Kerr, journalist and photographer on Ian’s ‘Civic Center’ story
21:45 — “Writing is built on a series of Hail Marys”
22:11 — Ian’s relationship with Quartersnacks
— Farran’s work for Quartersnacks
— ‘Multiple Purposes’, a review of TF at 1: Ten Years of Quartersnacks by Kyle Beachy • The Point (2016)
— ‘A Downtown Skateboard Blog Turns 10’ by Noah Johnson • The New York Times (2015)
23:26 — Pitching the story
24:28 — Interlude: J. Jonah Jameson, pt. i (Spider-Man, 2002)
24:47 — The editorial process of working with skate publications
25:30 — Interlude: J. Jonah Jameson, pt. ii (Spider-Man, 2002)
25:43 — Ian’s experiences of journalism school and skateboarding journalism
26:39 — Finding the through line and journalism’s ‘Gravedigger Theory’
— ‘It’s An Honour’ by Jimmy Breslin • The New York Herald Tribune (1963)
— ‘How Do Professional Skaters Deal with Health Insurance’ by Ian Browning • Jenkem Mag (2017)
— ‘The Athletes Who Can’t Afford Their Near-Death Experiences’ by Adam Elder • Intelligencer / New York Magazine (2023)
29:57 — Outro
— Referring to Jimmy Breslin in ‘Making The Big Leagues — How to Pitch to Skateboarding Magazines and Brands’ • Skate Bylines (2024)
— Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings published by the Library of America and edited by Dan Barry
— ‘Civic Center — A Profile of the L.E.S. Skatepark at Ten Years’ by Ian Browning for Quartersnacks (2022)
— ‘Editor’s Picks’ section of Skate Bylines
— “L.E.S.” by Childish Gambino (Instrumental)
Transcript
LES Skatepark: The ‘Civic Center’ of New York Skateboarding with Ian Browning
Farran Golding: We’re talking today about your story, ‘Civic Center — A Profile of the LES Skatepark at 10 Years’. We’re a couple of years out past that [anniversary] in talking about it but the reason I want to talk to you was that L.E.S. was the first place I skated, the first time I visited New York, in 2016. The park was pretty new then and something that jumped out at me when I went back in 2022 was it had weathered quite a bit in those years. What’s your earliest memory of skating the LES Skatepark and why was the park itself, ten years after the fact of it being built in its current form, important enough for you to write this profile on it?
Ian Browning: I wasn’t in New York City when LES was constructed. I was finishing college — for lack of a better term in Boston — and it made waves at that point. There are a lot of concrete skate parks on the East Coast right now but anything new that popped up was pretty remarkable and newsworthy.
I skipped my college graduation to go to a skate park that that just opened up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. It’s the size of a shoebox, it’s a fun little park, but point being, like, “Holy shit, we have these opportunity to skate this kind of stuff that was never around,” growing up in the North East for me.
It was pegged to opening for Go Skateboard Day [2012]. I didn’t go down for that. It wasn’t so monumental that it was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s a skate park.”
That Thanksgiving, my wife and I came down here just to have dinner with a friend. That was number one on my itinerary. I had a lot of fun skating there. But, to me, it always maintained level of prominence and importance. It was where you’d see like every event that happened in New York City, or a lot of the events that were happening in New York, would coincide with a demo there. It was a monumental achievement to get a big, concrete park, that flowed and offered what you’d see in California or on the West Coast in general.
I moved to New York, I guess the year after that, and people would still skate there a lot but the city saw the positive reception to it, opened up more skate parks, and it lost a little bit of the newness and the excitement. It’s 10:28am [at the time of speaking] — I guarantee you there’s probably at least 15 people skating there. But it lost a little bit of the spotlight as the city was able to just afford more skateparks to different neighbourhoods and different boroughs. But to me, it always felt like a very centralised one, still. As the spotlight spread out a little bit, I always felt like LES remain the figurehead of all of the skate parks within the city.
What can you tell me about the older incarnation to the LES Skatepark prior to the one we know today?
I never skated the old one. It was dingy. It was, at one point in time, a basketball court. Steve Rodriguez [founder of 5Boro Skateboards and spokesperson for NYC skateboarding] had been forever tirelessly advocating for the Brooklyn Banks. I think in lieu of actually getting progress on the Banks, the city council was willing to kick down some money for a skate park there. They brought in some prefab obstacle that got built on. A lot of the skate parks here, someone will end up someone will dragging something that’s maybe functional as a skatepark object, leave it there, and the Parks Department will say, “Oh, we have something new found.”
There were slabs of granite and some other stuff to grind, in addition to the prefab stuff, but it was all on a basketball court. They sealed it with a terrible sealant that was not designed for skate parks. Anytime you fell, anything that skidded across it would leave this viscous, black, sludge that was impossible to get off of whatever garment you’re wearing. I think one of the first Epicly Later’d where they have Dill skating around in Manhattan, he’s doing some tricks there in it.
To me, the thing that makes LES a good skate park is that there’s a ton of space and everything’s about three feet high. What do you think contributes to its longevity?
I think the space is a big thing. There’s a tendency a lot of the time with skate park designers… It’s like a kid in a candy shop situation sometimes, or maybe there’s, like, a checklist and you end up with like some features that get the space they deserve and some features where things get crammed into corners. The LES skatepark, there’s definitely still some of that going on but it’s pretty easy to flow through there. It doesn’t feel too congested, you don’t feel like you’re waiting in line to skate one thing and then jumping onto deck on the other side and waiting for a bunch of teenagers to go again. If the park is empty you could stand in any corner and drop in or start pushing, and flow and touch every obstacle. Which I really like. I don’t care for a skate park that’s, like, thirty square feet, ten feet of run up, one obstacle, and then ten feet of run out the other direction. I need space to figure out my footing and what I want to do.
Sidetracking away from skateboarding for a minute, have you read the book Low Life? It’s pretty much the Gangs Of New York era of that part of New York. Five Points, the Bowery, Lower East Side?
I have not read the book Low Life but yeah, definitely familiar with the Lower East Side’s cultural history.
Could you share the layman’s guide to that?
Yeah. I mean, the Lower East Side and that part of Manhattan was initially developed — it’s close to the water — as a seaport, kind of industrial area. New York City grew voluminously, at some point in time, very quickly along with that. There’s a lot of housing running into that. I think, in a true urban sense, housing at some point in time directly stacked on top of the industrial commercial applications.
The Lower East Side has always been, I think because of the conditions that I just described, for a long time it was a very working class, ethnically, religious — just diversity in general. Farther north on Manhattan, you have Central Park and these more “classic” neighbourhoods that are the stereotypically desirable ones. The Lower East Side falls into that category now because of all of the art and culture that’s bubbled up from being a dense and diverse immigrant community.
It’s in the headline that you suggest the LES skatepark is the “Civic Center” of New York skateboarding. In the piece you write, “If you subscribe to the idea that the Civic Center is the metaphorical hub of a city, it only makes sense that LES would be holy ground for New York City skateboarding. For three kids that live in Parkchester, Gowanus and Sunnyside to link up to skate, it’s a reasonable meet-up spot, and if you’re trying to throw a demo or contest, it is also well suited to handle the crowds. But most importantly, it also has about 30 trash cans, and Nestor needs to get to work on emptying them.” That’s the nutshell paragraph of the piece and we’ll get to who Nestor is very shortly. But that idea of a skatepark as a “civic center” I find interesting. You completely justify that phrase in the headline of the story but I think it’s mostly interesting because the idea of a something as a “civc center” for skateboarding would more often be attributed to a street spot. Is that something that you wrestled with at all when you were writing the story?
That’s a good question. Here’s how I’ll answer it: Tompkins Square Park’s reputation precedes itself. I had been reading about it earlier iterations of Quartersnacks long before coming down and regularly spending time and skating in the city. I think a street spot like Tompkins and a sanctioned skate park like the LES skatepark exist almost in parallel. There’s something there’s something very valuable about a skate park. I would prefer to be skating flat on a tennis court to skating a skatepark a lot of the time. But there’s something indelible about a skate park offering you, at least during the time that it’s open, a place where you can go skate unbothered and uninterrupted.
If you’re learning how to skateboard… If grew up around Tompkins some of the kids probably learned how to push and roll around and do all of that sort of stuff there. I’m drawing a hypothetical person here but if you don’t have skateboarding in your neighbourhood and you want to learn how to start, I think that’s what a skate park offers to a lot of people. It’s an accessible first point of, like, “How do I connect with this culture?”
Maybe you got a board and you pushed around on your sidewalk, driveway, whatever you have around; going to a skatepark — or a skate spot — but I think skateparks really offer that next step of connecting with culture at large, meeting other skateboarders, figuring out how to do it. It’s such an individual practice but there’s a lot of social etiquette that goes into it: not snaking people, waiting your turn, etc. Skateparks, oftentimes, are not the best, the best displays of this behaviour but for a lot of people, and the people that maybe get it and stick along with it in the longterm, that’s where you start to learn some of the social etiquette.
You almost absorb it peripherally. I’ve certainly cut people off and I’ve broken every rule at some point, in 20-something years of skateboarding, but you also see other people do it. There might be someone giving lessons one-on-one to a kid at the park but you’re not necessarily going to go there and see posted rules. It’s interesting because it really is an unspoken understanding of how… Because skateboarding works a different speed than as a pedestrian. Not to get into a Transworld video “skateboarders see the world differently” monologue but you start to adjust and understand timing, what works and what gets in people’s way, and things like that.
Considering that proximity of the Brooklyn Banks to the LES skatepark and the idea of writing about places as a “civic center”, I do wonder if had the Banks stayed skate-able from their heyday, to today, you very well could have been writing this story about the Brooklyn Banks.
Yeah, it’s possible. I didn’t come to New York until 2010. I missed out on the ‘90s but the ‘90s were full of stories about essentially skating back and forth from Supreme which is close to Astor Place, down to the Banks, and back and forth. They were these two kind of hubs where people would meet up and link up and skate. Now that skateparks are around, it’s interesting just talking about from the context of like where things were in 2011 to today. Where I feel like there are more places, like, Tompkins is a legal spot now. You don’t have to worry about potentially getting kicked out by a roller hockey team like you did at the time. There’s always going to be these sort of central hubs whether they’re defined as a skatepark or whether it’s just, you know, the Astor Place kerb, as people skated, was a traffic island where you didn’t really run into a ton of traffic. It became this central thing because it’s easy for people to link up there.
I think that’s a lot of it in New York. It’s easy to get around sometimes but it’s also big. There are some places to get that are easier than others. I borrowed the “Civic Center” idea, in part, from the fact that City Hall — Black Hubba — the federal courthouse — all of that stuff comes out of the redevelopment of the Five Points neighbourhood. Also, almost all the trains go to Manhattan and almost all of the trains run through that southernmost tip there. I think that is a major factor in establishing the foothold that it has as well. If this was out at the end of one train line, and you were coming from a different borough and you have to spend an hour and a half to get there, there’s not going to be as many people as there will be at this park, still years later, on a sunny day. It’s because it’s really easy to get there and then once you’re there, everybody is warmed up, there are other spots to go to from there.
Another line from the story that I wanted to hone in on is: “Having multiple places where kids could skate for six hours straight laid groundwork for New York to establish itself as a viable third option for skaters trying to make waves in an industry that had traditionally focused most of its resources and attention between San Francisco and San Diego.” The period where the LES skatepark pops up coincides with this early-to-mid 2010s renaissance, when New York becomes a place that has a lot of eyes on. You know, 2010 to 2015 there’s Johnny Wilson’s crew, Bronze, “cherry”, Static IV… I think they had a lot of far reaching effects of why skaters my age — born in, like, ’95. Gravitated to New York and East Coast skateboarding. To backtrack to your quote, it’s interesting that LES exists in this vacuum of a lot of things happening in New York and on the East Coast. What else do you think the main developments in that early-to-mid 2010s era which made New York so significant within [contemporary] skateboarding?
I think a lot of it is really hinged on late Web 2.0. Early social media as well as like being able to host videos online; I don’t know what the “industry” perception of skateboarding in New York was in 2001 or 1996. But by the time I was in college, I could read early Quartersnacks, there was a lot of cool edits coming out of [NYC], even before Epicly Later’d as the series — which I think was another watershed moment — you had Patrick O’Dell’s Epicly Later’d website. You’d photo blogs, like, “Cool, there’s a lot happening in New York” — this real affirmation that you can skate here, there’s a lot of spots, there’s really cool stuff. I obviously saw Bobby Puleo in Static II earlier than that, but it’s like, “There’s a whole city to be skated here.”
The impression that I always had was that it was too expensive for skateboarders to, like, fuck off and be skateboarders here. Seeing some of that stuff that I just described, I was in college in Boston which is four hours away but there was a Chinatown bus that would run from Chinatown in Boston to Chinatown and Manhattan for $15 each way. It was like, “Yeah, cool.” You can go down on the weekend, be back up on Monday, and have fun skating. Downtown Manhattan in 2009 is a fun time to be 21.
When it comes to the story for Quartersnacks, how did you map out the approach? You make it very interesting with a heavy municipal focus about park space with the LES skatepark as a lens to explore that. Did you have this almost checklist of various things you wanted to discuss with it?
This definitely evolved over over time. But the initial concept I set out with was looking at the aftermath of it. Skateparks went from — someone’s going to tell me in the comments this is wrong — but there were three or four skateparks in New York City when LES opened. Like I said, it set off a real wave of a ton of them. I was interested in how how that works. Is there a skatepark department at the New York City Parks Department? New York City has great parks, really cool, innovative stuff. I have kids. I gone to a lot of different playgrounds and a lot of different cities. New York City, because it’s so dense, makes a point to include parks in a lot of tight spaces. Because of the spatial concerns in addition to [the population], the city is willing to take chances and do things that are a little bit different than every playground ever, which is really cool. I was curious what, as an agency, what their approach is to skate parks.I didn’t really know how to do that.
I reached out to Steve Rodriguez who connected me with a someone higher up at Parks. I had told him the idea I was looking for a “day in the life” slice of what it takes to maintain these things. He agreed to help connect me with a park supervisor, if memory serves me correctly COVID lockdowns happened, initially, life got a little bit in the way, and I picked it back up and the end of 2021.
You open the story talking to Nestor, a Parks Department member. How did he kind of become the protagonist of a story or your entry way into it? I thought that was really interesting and novel. The opening line of the story — “Tell me how someone shits on a wall?” — is a broadside to open.
I got incredibly lucky. I pitched the story to Kosta [Konstantin Satchek, founder and editor of Quartersnacks] in 2021 and Eric Adams, the current mayor, took over in 2022. Our current mayor is a former cop and has been, generally speaking, curtailing cooperation with press on any level. By the time I had formally tried to reach out to Parks’ press offices my connect I had previously made had basically said, “No, we can’t do that anymore.”
I went back and forth with the Park’s press people who maybe didn’t understand the ask, maybe they were really busy, or maybe they were like, “What is this fucking website called? ‘Quartersnacks’? We don’t have time for this.”
I was persistent emails and calls but was continually brushed off, left, right, left down. It finally came down to Christian Kerr — who took the photos — he and I were talking. It was like, “Alright, this park is listed as opening up at 7am on the Parks’ website. Which means that someone comes, in theory, at 7:00 to open the gates. What we want to do is get on Citi Bikes at 6:30 in the morning, bike over there, and just be there when this guy shows up at seven.”
Hell of a long shot. I appreciate Christian being down to get up at 6:00am on this adventure with me. But it worked in a way that I could have never anticipated that it would in that I spoke to Nestor who was a great guy to talk to. I know he wasn’t allowed to speak on the record but was the type of guy that I could come down at 7:00am, and be like, “Hey, we’re doing this story for this skateboard website. What do you think about it?” He was like a, “You want to know how it is? Let me tell you how it really is” sort of guy. Which paid dividends.
Had you ever done anything like that writing a story previously?
No. I think everything with writing, you’re just built on a series of Hail Marys.
“I wonder if this person will like this idea?” — whoever is down to run it and then you’re like, “Well, now I to talk to the source.”
You’re constantly lining things up like that but, certainly, pulling somebody else in a harebrained scheme, this was the first time I’d done that or gotten up that early.
What was Quartersnacks to you up until that point? This is a weird one for me to ask because I do stuff for Quartersnacks so regularly. But to you, what was QS as an outlet at that point in time and why did you think, tonally, it would be a good fit [for the story] beyond its focus on New York?
I guess as a child of that late Web 2.0 era, Quartersnacks has been on my radar for a long time. I had always admired Kosta’s voice in general. He has a unique voice within skateboarding, I think that style of writing has become more normalised at this point.
Sure: writing about skateboarding from the perspective of the Tompkins bench. By which I mean, I really appreciated references to like contemporary rap music and interactions with culture at large. I’ve spoken Kosta probably a handful of times in person but I believe we’re about the same age. It was very different and felt much more tailored to what I was interested in reading in my early 20s than anybody else in skateboarding who I think was writing at the time.
How did you go in with the pitch?
We maybe followed each other on social media and I just sent a DM being like, “Hey, I have a story.” He sent me his email and I pitched a simpler version, I think, of what we initially talked about. Which was like a slice of life of what goes into maintaining [the LES skatepark.].
He’s a fun person to write for because there aren’t a ton of deadlines. I was working as a bartender at the time and was devoting even less time to writing than I do it these days. So I didn’t feel a ton of pressure to crank something out but I was able to kind of keep going along and send him updates. He’d be like, “That’s cool! We should talk about this too” or “Hey, I thought about this, I was thinking about including some colour or perspective from this angle.”
“Yeah, that sounds really cool. You could talk to this person about it.”
As I was writing it, I came to realise some of the broader stuff about what I talked about: how this was the first one in a wave of skateparks and the way that it had transformed the city’s perception within the industry. It grew organically over the course of seven months of writing.
I have been very thankful for every opportunity and every editor that has ever green-lit anything I’ve done. Generally speaking, working with skate editors, the most back and forth I get is early on before I’ve started writing, fleshing out a pitch, like: “Maybe should look at this angle.”
There’s not a lot of that minutia [with skate publications]. “Do you want schedule a twenty minute phone call so that you can get one sentence out of this?”
Christian Kerr doesn’t work as an editor anymore but he is one of the few other people that I can talk about that consistently was doing what you described which was really cool. But I have not dealt with a lot of it. Kosta was really good as well.
The archetypal writer who has an almost adversarial relationship with editors, I haven’t experienced a ton of that. My writing experience is all based on journalism school and getting that sort of experience from professors. I went straight from that to skateboarding which is this very hands-off thing. I was left oftentimes thinking to myself, “I don’t know if this is how the “real world” works…” in terms of writing. It helped me grow as a writer to have that hands off approach because it forced me to hand off more completed work. Essentially, not expecting any help and trying to anticipate these questions.
You know, you finish the piece and you’re like, “Well, is there anything that I’m missing here? Does this check all the boxes? Do I have any red flags hanging?” When I was in college, I would have turned in the draft to get it done, waited for feedback, and put more thought into the next draft. [Writing for skateboarding publications] it was a lot trying to do learn how to do all of that myself.
What are your thoughts on going for those stories where initially you might think, “Is this too niche of an angle?” Do you find that those are usually the ones that end up being the most fun? Like, the idea of “Who’s going to care about this story?” can be like, “Yeah, no one’s going to care about it?” or it might really strike a chord with people. Here we are for instance, two years after you wrote the story, talking about it for this thing.
I will say there’s a piece of a point of reference for this piece that I borrowed heavily from. There’s a former New York Daily News columnist named Jimmy Breslin. He has very famous piece that I read about in journalism school and I think probably a lot of other people have read in similar academic settings. In November of 1963, he profiled a guy named Clifton Pollard who was the grave digger at Arlington National Cemetery. It’s written from the perspective of him waking up on Sunday morning and going to work to dig JFK’s grave. This fascinating angle to look at this, obviously, huge newsworthy event with tons of barrels of ink spilled over it. It’s just finding an interesting throughline in it.
That, to me wanting to write about LES skatepark, I knew that ten years were coming up and that it had some level of impact on skate culture but it was like, “What can I really say about this that will say anything new about it?” There’s nothing new to explain in a lot of ways but, ultimately, it’s like: “Well, what does it take to run it then?” I think that there are ways to do that with anything.
I sent you a story I wrote for Jenkem about pro skater health insurance. I remember that was around the time they were trying to kill the Affordable Care Act. Reading a lot about that in the newspaper and Alexis Castro at Jenkem had something something about pro skaters getting health insurance on Twitter. It was another, like, “Oh, yeah!” moment; knowing that pro skaters are independent contractors which means they’re not giving health insurance.
The point of all of that is to say: there are big monolithic ideas that might seem difficult to write about. There’s no skate newsrooms, you don’t have like a lot of resources as a skate writer, and if you wanna take on a project that is bigger you have to figure it out for yourself. Like I said, the press department at the Parks Department is not going to respond to you or take you seriously sometimes. But there’s still ways to like find an interesting throughline in there. It’s just a matter thinking critically about it and, at some point in time, you have this on-the-bench-at-the-spot conversation. Or you’re talking to your friend at the bar and you’re like, “Holy shit, that’s the little detail,” that you can use.
Nestor, he’s the main character of the story. He ties everything together. He ties to history and the way that Parks operates and all of those things. It’s about getting lucky and finding those throughlines that you can take and like run and use it as like a fracture in the facade to get in and start addressing bigger stuff.
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