Tony Hawk Got Kicked Out of Pershing Square on Pro Skater 3's Birthday

The skateboarding legend was shooting a 25th-anniversary video for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 at the downtown park, he wrote on Instagram.

Tony Hawk went back to Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles on Friday to skate a spot from the video game with his name on the cover, and got thrown out.

"Fun fact: we got kicked out of Pershing Square while shooting this today," Hawk wrote on Instagram, KTLA reported. The shoot was a skate video marking 25 years of "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3," which came out in North America on Oct. 30, 2001. That means he was bounced on the game's actual birthday.

In the clip, Hawk returns to Los Angeles spots that show up in the game, the square and the Downtown Car Wash among them, according to KTLA's report. It's a victory lap through a level of his own game. One stop ended with him being shown the exit.

Neither Hawk's caption nor KTLA's report says who asked him to leave or what rule was cited. The square at 532 S. Olive St. is run by the city's Department of Recreation and Parks, which lists a security office for the park on its own page.

The city's written park rules don't settle it either. Section 63.44 of the Municipal Code says no one shall "drive or ride any cycle or vehicle, whether powered by a motor or human power, except on paths, roads or drives designed and provided for such purposes," according to the code text quoted in a City Council motion. That line doesn't use the word skateboard.

Then there's the name in Hawk's caption. The Los Angeles City Council voted 11-0 on Sept. 4 to rename the square Biddy Mason Park, MyNewsLA reported. Mason was born into slavery, won her freedom in a Los Angeles court and was among the earliest Black women in the city to own land.

The park started out in 1866 as La Plaza Abaja and took the World War I general's name in 1918. "General Pershing never set foot into the city of L.A., and that was the sixth renaming of the square," Councilwoman Ysabel Jurado said, according to MyNewsLA.

So the square in the game still carries the general's name, and the real one now carries Mason's. On Friday, it didn't have room for Tony Hawk.

Source: sports.yahoo.com, retrieved October 31, 2026. Other sources: laparks.org, codelibrary.amlegal.com, mynewsla.com.