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By CAROLINE ROTHSTEIN  l Narratively May 2, 2013

August 1990, St. Marks Place. Priscilla Forsyth, one month shy of her fourteenth birthday and just home from summer camp, straddles one of the two lion statues guarding the downward staircase to the apartment building her family has owned since 1975. Naturally blonde Liza and dyed blonde Margaret idle with her. It’s hot out, and Priscilla is becoming more curious about the world beyond her sidewalk.

An energetic kid with a scrawny but chiseled build named Harold Hunter rides up on his BMX bike. “I’ve never seen blonde people in New York” before, he tells the girls, giggling. He was from the Campos Plaza Housing Projects nearby–a different world, to be sure, although he’d obviously seen blonde girls before.

“That was his little excuse to start talking to us,” Priscilla recalls. “Harold was known for that.” The superlatives, the tall tales and jokes, the genuinely amicable first encounters–anyone who knew him knew that was Harold.

A month later, Priscilla and her friends were meandering downtown drinking forties, celebrating her birthday. They passed the Astor Place cube, a favored location for New York City’s premiere skateboard crew at the time. Priscilla and her girlfriends exchanged numbers with the skaters, and joined them the next day at the Brooklyn Banks, a world-renowned skateboarding mecca underneath the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge–that is, until the city shut it down a few years ago to use as storage space for bridge restoration.

When the girls arrived at the Banks, they met Harold and his friends, an infamous crew of amateur and professional skateboarders who rode alongside moving taxicabs and jumped off building and museum steps. Wherever they went throughout the city, the boys rode with a gutsy and fluid style. “It looked like art on a skateboard,” says Peter Bici, a skater and close friend of Harold’s. “It was a combination of New York City and the movement of streets and constant continuity of the city’s energy.” The kids loved each other like family, and didn’t give a shit about what anyone else thought of them. “We were minding our own business,” says Peter. “We don’t bother you. You don’t bother us. We all had each other’s backs.” It was an era when skateboarding wasn’t cool. If they heard wheels coming down the street, they’d run after them.

When Harold saw the girls, invited by his other friends, he made sure everyone knew he met them first. Priscilla says this now, twenty-three years later, imitating Harold in the nasal, raspy voice his loved ones mimic when telling Harold stories; the impersonation brings a comical lightness to the forefront, just like Harold always did.

Harold started regularly coming to the Forsyths’ for dinner. He became Priscilla’s surrogate brother. “Families didn’t adopt Harold, he adopted families,” says Priscilla’s sister Jessica.

Priscilla, now thirty-six, and Jessica, thirty-nine, with a black father from Grenada and a white mother from the Cleveland suburbs, went to the prestigious Hunter College Elementary and High Schools, commuting each weekday to the Upper East Side. But it was in the East Village where they met the skater crew, and Harold started bringing his friends over to the the house too. Soon enough, the Forsyths’ apartment on St. Marks Place became another stomping ground, a clubhouse of sorts for this group of “lost boys.” Many, like Harold, hailed from broken homes.

*  *  *

When the 1995 film Kids, written by Harmony Korine and directed by Larry Clark, was released, Newsweek called it “astonishing”; Janet Maslin of the New York Times said it was “a wake-up call to the modern world.” The Motion Picture Association of America initially branded the film with an NC-17 rating; upstart film producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein created a new distribution company to release it unrated into theaters. […]

Kids came from the minds of Korine, a skate kid from Tennessee whose grandmother lived in Queens and hung out with Harold and his friends, and Clark, already known for his gritty, sexualized youth photography. (Clark had started photographing the crew in the early 1990s.) It was the first film for both, and the camera barely leaves the kids, none of whom were actors at the time; all were plucked from Harold’s skater crew and elsewhere downtown.

Those of us who watched Kids as adolescents, growing up in an era before iPhones, Facebook, and Tiger Moms, had our minds blown from wherever we were watching–whether it was the Angelika Film Center on the Lower East Side or our parents’ Midwestern basements. We were captivated by the entirely unsupervised teens smoking blunts, drinking forties, hooking up, running amok and reckless through the New York City streets. Simultaneously, the driving storyline highlighted the terror of HIV and AIDS, which was at its apex in the mid-nineties.

Justin Pierce, who played Casper, took his life in July 2000, the first of several tragedies for the kids. Harold, who played himself in the film and is best remembered for swinging his dick around in the pool scene—he was that kid who wasn’t afraid, who radiated a magnetic and infectious energy both on and off screen—is gone too. He died in February 2006 from a drug-induced heart attack.

The film grossed millions and deeply impacted the lives and careers of all involved. Korine, who just released his newest film Spring Breakers, went on to artistic claim and fame. Clark continues making films and controversial photography, but Kids remains by far his most well-known project. Several kids went on to successful acting careers, most notably Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson. Zoo York, the skate brand created in 1993 and home base for many in the crew, blew up overnight. New York skaters went from mini-celebrities in the extreme sport world to global notoriety; while on a Zoo York skate tour, Harold was recognized by film fans as far away as Japan.

In a coffee shop on the Lower East Side this spring, Peter Bici, a pro skateboarding legend who appeared in the film, tells me it’s not about him–the film, the interview, this article. Now a New York City fireman with a wife and daughter, Peter speaks with a thick, classic New York accent as tears well up in his eyes. “It’s about Harold and Justin,” he says. “I just want to keep Justin and Harold alive with these stories. It’s not about me, really. It’s not. It’s about them. That’s why I’m here. They still live on.”

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