Hervé Riou, a French chef mobilizes for Brooklyn skateboarders
The alliance is surprising: a French chef - a solid Breton sailor who has been living in New York for more than 30 years - becomes the spokesperson for young skateboarders from Brooklyn, and fights to try to offer them a “skate park” of a new kind, in the middle of a real garden.
It is a family tragedy that is at the source of this commitment by Hervé Riou: the accidental death in 2019 of Pablo Ramirez, the son of his wife, Loren Michelle. Pablo was a professional skateboarder, jazz musician and artist. After his death - following a traffic accident, while he was on a skateboard - Loren Michelle decides to create a foundation to help young skateboarders, on their boards, but also to help them develop their artistic talents. The foundation created music lessons with the Coltrane church in San Francisco, of which Pablo Ramirez was a regular, or art, painting, music and skate lessons in New York.
But the ambition of the foundation goes further: for several months, Loren Michelle and Hervé Riou have been fighting to build a “skate park” in Brooklyn. "As a chef, I have a particular passion for gardens," explains Hervé Riou. For the catering company Loren ran until recently, he cultivated an urban vegetable garden in Brooklyn. “This relationship with nature, with the products of nature, is important to me; we want to bring this same closeness to nature to kids who skate: get them out of vacant lots under the highway bridges where they are confined today, to put them in parks ".
The foundation therefore wishes to build, around Prospect Park, a “community skate garden” which is a space of a new kind, combining skateboarding, gardening and the arts. To do this, it presents a project to the vote of the inhabitants. The procedure has a name: “participatory budget”. Each year, it allows residents of “district 39” (which includes the areas of Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Gowanus, Park Slope (in particular), to vote to choose a project proposed by residents, which will then be funded by the city. Loren Michelle and Hervé Riou are asking for $ 300,000 to be able to launch the project. They are competing with, among other things, a toilet from a local school or a dance floor for another school. (Voting is done by internet is open to any resident of the area over 11 years old, until April 14).
Passionate about sailing, a cook for more than 40 years, Hervé Riou admits: “skateboarding has never been a personal passion (he took his first steps on a board a few months ago), but you have to open up your soul, open up to others. I had this idea of the garden married to skateboarding after a dream in which I was with Pablo in a garden… ”The chef, in love with nature, thus became the defender of the interests of a group of young skaters, dreaming to reconnect the very urban culture of skateboarding with nature and the garden.
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VOTE WEEK April 5-14
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