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LAWRENCE — It’s an hour before dusk as Ryan Torres pushes off from the top of Bowdoin Street and glides down the middle into the growing swirl of boys who have come to practice their power slides and kick flips — and to soak up some of the outsider aura that surrounds their sport.

“It’s the smoothest street in Lawrence,” said Torres, an 11th grader at Haverhill High School, standing atop his longboard — a longer, wider cousin of the skateboard — and offering a simple explanation of what brought him here.

A little later in the evening, as night settles on Bowdoin Street and Ryan and his friends disperse to their homework and video games, City Councilor Eileen Bernal calls the committee she chairs to order. After a 30-minute discussion, the committee gives tentative approval to a bill that would ban skateboarders from city streets, corralling them onto the sidewalks or into the skateboard park in Misserville Park on Allen Street.

“They’re in the middle of the street, in hordes and packs, I don’t know what the right word is,” Bernal told the committee about her own encounters with skateboarders. “The newest phenomenon is they lay flat on their boards. You can’t see them over your hood.”

Bernal’s bill would add Lawrence to the list of communities nationwide that are regulating skateboarding in response to the resurgent interest in a sport developed in the 1940s by California surfers looking for something to do in the winter. Today, one out of six American children owns a skateboard — 9.3 million in all — according to Board-Trac, a sports marketing and research company.

Advocates for stricter regulation say skateboarding’s growing popularity has coincided with an increasing number of injuries and accidents, including a collision with a car driven by a hit-and-run driver on a Taunton street on Aug. 4 that killed 17-year-old Nicholas Silva-Thomas. Data on accidents and injuries was not immediately available for this story.

Drawn to repaved streets

Wherever they’re enacted, laws regulating skateboards often set up a David-and-Goliath clash of cultures, pitting police, local officials and neighborhood associations against groups of mostly adolescent boys, including many who are drawn to skateboarding by its freewheeling, anarchistic appeal and high risk, and the fact that more than any other sport, its playing field is the street.

In Lawrence, the appeal of the street has grown significantly over the last year, as the city began repaving streets that had been neglected for years. Bowdoin Street got its glassy-smooth coat of asphalt early in the summer which, along with the gentle decline in the grade of the street that is a perfect pitch for a longboard, made it irresistible to Christian Pimentel, 10, a fourth-grader at Frost Elementary School.

“The other streets are way too bumpy,” Christian said one evening last week as his friends swarmed around him on their longboards, jumping curbs and weaving through the light but steady traffic. “I tried to power slide on another street and got hurt.”

Here, the pull of skateboarding seems stronger than a Bruins game.

“Five pieces of steel,” Your Majesty (he and his friends insist that’s his real name) Medina boasted about the planking inside his purple Mini Logo board, which comes nearly up to the chest of the 9-year-old when he stands it on end. “These are bullet trucks. It says ‘bullet’ right here. The bearings to these wheels are ABEC 8’s. If the wheels are too big, you get wheel bite.”

‘It’s their street’

Like clockwork for the last four months, the boys have come to the corner of Bowdoin and Clifton streets in the early evening to show off their tricks and their boards and bruises, jump the granite curbs and stage impromptu competitions. They’re almost all boys between 9 and 16 years old. A few girls mingle around the edges, but it’s not the longboards that seem to bring them to Bowdoin Street. It’s the boys who ride them.

On this night, none wore protective gear such as a helmet or gloves. There were no adults present, except those behind the wheels of the cars that picked their way down the block and a woman who came out of her house to offer her view of the ritual. She identified herself only as Marie.

“This is what we have to deal with,” she said, sweeping her hand across the noisy, chaotic swirl in front of her house. “These kids are not getting out of the way. We’ve seen them grab onto the back of a city bus for a ride. That’s a four-way stop on the corner. They just fly through it. I’ve spoken to them and they don’t care. Their attitude is it’s their street. It’s like we’re inconveniencing them. It’s like we’re in their way. They need a skate park. They need somewhere to go.”

In fact, Lawrence opened a skate park at a cost of $500,000 in 2007, but the park has little appeal to longboarders who do fewer tricks than skateboarders and need gentler declines.

“At community meetings, this is one of the top issues we hear about,” police Chief John Romero said about the growing numbers of longboarders in the city as its streets are repaved. He said he’s directed officers to confiscate the board of anyone found skating recklessly in a street and keep it until the boarder shows up with his parents. Romero said he would welcome a new city ordinance that would include fines or other penalties.

“If you keep them off the street, they’ll end up indoors or breaking the law,” said Miki Vuckovich, executive director of the Tony Hawk Foundation, a California non-profit group that provides grants for building skate parks. “It seems counter-productive when our national goal is to get kids outdoors and keep them active.”

“It’s not going to happen,” Torres, the Haverhill student, said about the compliance the city can expect if it attempts to chase longboarders from the streets or impose some of the other regulations the City Council is considering. “If you’re going to have to ride in lines and wear a helmet, that’s not the thing about skating.”

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