The long-abandoned swimming pool located behind the historic Mackay Estate Gate Lodge in East Hills was demolished on March 2, 2022. The area is being cleared for a six-home housing development. The Mackay Estate Gate Lodge is being restored by the Village of East Hills with the assistance of the Roslyn Landmark Society.
For 13 years, the pool became known as an unauthorized skateboarding site. Last week, seven skateboarders bid farewell to "one of the best places in the world to pool skateboard."
Professional skateboarder Zered Basset and the pool were featured on the cover of the December 2013 issue of Transworld .https://skateboarding.transwor...
Our Favorite Covers Of 2013 And The Stories Behind Them | Transworld SKATEboarding
This photo of Zered was shot during the first official filming trip for the 26th TransWorld video that Christopher Thiessen and I took with Brad Cromer and Zered Bassett to New York in August 2013.
On our first day, Steve Marino drove us out to a pool that Tony Farmer had shown Zered out in Roslyn; hidden in a pretty secluded woody area, the pool itself is a huge abandoned and overgrown public swimming pool with a large rectangular shallow end whose tightly transitioned walls take a sharp right angled turn into a much shorter deep end section with bigger transitions.
Zered wanted to skate the deep end but it had a solid few feet of water in it, so after pumping out the deep end, Zered started skating the shallow section of the pool in bare feet whilst waiting for the damp walls in the deep end to dry. I went back to Steve’s car to grab some water and by the time I got back Zered had his shoes back on and was frontside grinding over the shallow end deathbox.
I thought that it would make a sick photo because the tranny is so tight that getting up on to the coping was pretty heavy, so when Zered asked me to wait a few more tries so that he could try another trick, switch hurricane was definitely not something that I was thinking he might try; needless to say I was blown away when I saw him locked in and grinding text book switch hurricanes within a few tries.
Zered has always been a really interesting skater to me for a number of reasons but especially because his trick selection is as varied as it is deep and the terrain that he choses to apply those tricks to is as diverse as the tricks themselves, and I think that this photo is a perfect example of those attributes.
For me to get a photo of Zered switch hurricaning a pool in New York and have it used as a cover of TransWorld is a dream scenario that seemed unlikely to ever happen right up until I had the magazine itself in my hands. Thanks to Steve Marino for all the help whilst we were out in New York, congrats to Brad who turned pro in the middle of our stay and a huge shout out to Zered for making the trip so memorable.—Oliver Barton
Country Estates Swim Club (circa 1990)
1 Comments
I’m generally familiar with Roslyn, but had no idea there was a pool behind the Gate Lodge. Really neat they used it as a skate park.