Girls, In Skirts, On Bikes.

In a city that has banned hacky-sack (you might hit the tourists), hanging out (loitering laws set caps on the number of people and the time limit to staying in one spot, also led to the removal of public benches), and playing music (accepting tips is legally equated to begging), kids in Santa Cruz are denied the vibrant streetscape that once defined the place. In an effort to curb the homeless from sleeping on our main drag, the city outlawed traditional street uses and made it a generally uninteresting and sterile. It made the city more commercially viable and big box stores moved in. Instead of walking from the anarchist/new age/smells-like-incense bookstore to the movie theater showing independents and midnight movies, we were confronted with walking from Borders to Starbucks and from the Gap to Regal Cinemas.

As our sleepy college town rapidly gentrified, we were finally forced to make our own fun. Tuesdays became bicycle night, and the Girls-in-Skirts-on-Bikes ride was born, started, ironically, by a boy in a skirt on a bike. We rode around town as a silly semi-skirted parade, exploring playgrounds, cemeteries, the waterfront, and, of course, the ubiquitous parking lot. Our parking lot was on the top of a City-owned garage (they hadn’t banned us from there yet!); we ended there every Tuesday for a round or ten of bike polo. Though it wasn't the ideal surface--the parking lot bumpers killed our passes and tacoed our wheels--our re-purposing of the space transformed it from an empty sea of concrete to an informal community space.

J.B. Jackson celebrates the other uses of the parking lot as a "vindication of the vernacular," a justification for its existence. The parking lot has no inherent character--Jackson says its "undifferentiated in form, empty, with no significant topographical features to determine use" (76)--so its only meaning is that which we give to it. For that hour on Tuesday nights, the top floor of the garage no longer represented the relationship between managers and employees or consumers and producers, but rather the relationship between a group of high schoolers and twenty-somethings, and a city council that wanted to ignore that 25% of the Santa Cruz population is between 18 and 22. Unacknowledged by anyone but ourselves, it was our small fight for a piece of space in a place that ignored our needs. We liked to think we won.

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