Spot
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1989 — 2001
Gone but documented. The spot itself is no longer skateable — its history lives on here.
READ ITS HISTORY ↓Justin Herman Plaza on the waterfront. The four-block, the Gonz gap, the big three. Central to West Coast street skating through the 90s. Renovated around 2000 with anti-skate additions; Mike Carroll commemorative plaque installed at the site in 2023.
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MARBLE
7.5/10
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1989 — 2001
JAN 1, 1972
Premier American street-skating site of the early 1990s. Cleared into view by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, walled off in the early 2000s.
Background. Justin Herman Plaza, designed by Lawrence Halprin & Associates with Mario Ciampi & Associates and John Bolles & Associates, opened in 1972. The plaza is dominated by Armand Vaillancourt's 1971 brutalist fountain. For its first seventeen years the plaza sat behind the elevated Embarcadero Freeway and saw modest civic use. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the freeway and forced its demolition, opening the plaza to light and to view. Skaters discovered the four-block, the Gonz gap, the big three, and the long granite ledges almost immediately. Through the 1989-1993 golden era EMB became the most filmed, most consequential street-skating location in the United States, exporting the East Coast / West Coast skate vocabulary that defined the decade. Plaza security and the city pushed back from the mid-1990s, knobbing ledges and patrolling the site. The original layout was renovated in the early 2000s with anti-skate additions. In 2017 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors renamed the plaza to Embarcadero Plaza, citing Justin Herman's role in displacing minority residents from the Western Addition, Fillmore, and South of Market neighborhoods. A commemorative plaque honouring Mike Carroll and the EMB skate era was installed at the site in 2023.