Andy Kessler (skateboarder)
Andrew Kessler was a Greek-born American skateboarder, skatepark builder, and prominent member of a loose-knit collective of skateboarders and graffiti artists called the Soul Artists of Zoo York. Kessler is featured in the documentary Deathbowl to Downtown.
Early life
Andy and his twin sister were born in Athens, Greece, adopted by an American family and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York. He started skateboarding in the early 1970s in Central Park, on a short hill near to its West 69th Street entrance. He soon joined a group of inner city kids congregating around "the bandshell," though the scene was primarily based in the Rumsey Playfield playground directly behind Central Park's Naumburg Bandshell, inside the park at West 71st Street, the street on which Kessler was raised. The steep paths of nearby Riverside Park also became a favorite haunt of Kessler and other skateboarders.Skateboarding career
As skateboard technology advanced through the introduction of urethane wheels and specially designed skateboard trucks replaced makeshift rollerskate trucks, Kessler joined other New York kids in developing new forms and styles of skating, including the use of ramps—often consisting of plywood billboard leaned against a park wall or building—to "go vertical" and improvise other acrobatic tricks.Several members of the Soul Artists, an innovative New York City graffiti crew, were hanging out at "the bandshell," though the Soul Artists were actually founded by Marc "Ali" Edmonds and began elsewhere in Central Park. Some of the graffiti writers were also skateboarders, and Kessler, emerging as a leading figure among city boarders, helped found an associated group that became known as the skateboard crew Soul Artists of Zoo York.
Legendary graffiti writers such as Zephyr, Crunch, and Haze were also in this crew, and the elaborate skateboards that they crafted in 1979, bearing the graffiti-styled lettering "ZOO YORK" in the same "cross" style as Santa Monica's "DOG TOWN," were the first-ever use of what is now a famous trademark employed by Ecko Unlimited.
Featured in trade catalogues and articles in skateboard magazines such as Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding, Kessler became a guiding force in the design, development, funding and building of "skateparks" citywide, nationwide and eventually worldwide. He was also a community youth activist who worked with city teens to better themselves, their circumstances, and their urban environment, often in conjunction with the creation of free skating facilities to expend their energies on.