Sit for a while some evening at your favorite gourmet restaurant on Boylston Street — Burger King’s my choice — and listen to the sounds of the evening. Most likely, what you will hear is the clicking and clacking of skateboards on Copley Square as skateboarders try to master the intricacies of the steps and benches around the fountain and Trinity Church.

Blame it on Alan Ollie Gelfand.

Skateboarding was invented in the 1960s when people who did not live in California longed to experience firsthand the surfin’ world of the Beach Boys. Rather than travel to the shore, they brought the shore to themselves, screwing the wheels of roller skates onto modified surfboards. They called it sidewalk surfing. It was kind of dull, since it involved little more than rolling from one place to another, and it would probably have been a short-lived phenomenon but for Gelfand’s invention of the Ollie.

The Ollie saved skateboarding. The trick behind the Ollie involved kicking down the rear of the board with one foot while pushing the other forward and jumping into the air. Amazingly, the skateboard would lift with the skater, as if the board were glued to one’s feet. A world of balletic possibilities beckoned.

Skateboarding can be a beautiful, exciting and dramatic sport. Gymnastic in quality, it is thrilling and dangerous to its participants. Skateboarders take enormous pride in their boards, polishing and decorating them to make them uniquely theirs. Like surfing (and snowboarding, a successor sport), skateboarding has a bit of a cult quality to it. A very individualistic activity, it is nevertheless usually done in large groups, with each performer showing off for the others.

Skateboarding has gone through cycles of popularity and decline. It was popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s and then almost disappeared as a sport by 1992 as fewer and fewer people participated. But for a variety of reasons it has made a comeback in the five years since then, and as dusk falls one can find skateboarders seemingly everywhere: in parks, at the library, on sidewalks and in parking garages. It is reputedly America’s sixth largest participant sport.

But for the same reason we don’t play football in the Public Garden or have Formula One racing on Commonwealth Avenue, skateboarding doesn’t work in a lot of spaces. The sport itself causes a lot of damage, particularly to benches and the lips of stone steps. It also overwhelms places, pushing out other users intimidated by large, almost exclusively male, crowds practicing all manner of grinds, rail slides and shuvits. Spaces once available to all have become closed, as skateboarders take them over and drive everyone else out.

Boston already has rules prohibiting skateboarding in public parks. In the past, enforcement has been sporadic. But over the last few weeks the Boston police have taken a tougher approach, cracking down on skateboarding in Copley Square and seizing dozens of boards in the process.

But the law has not yet caught up with the police. Even as skateboarders are pushed off of public parks, they just move to other spaces, such as the adjacent main branch of the Boston Public Library. Why? Because there are no laws prohibiting or regulating skateboarding on those spaces or, indeed, anywhere else in the city.

That, I hope, is about to change. The City Council is about to begin deliberations on a new ordinance that would prohibit skateboarding on all public spaces unless otherwise permitted by rule or regulation. Violations of the ordinance would be treated like traffic offenses, and penalties would include fines and community service.

It’s a reasonable ordinance. Skateboarders aren’t bad (indeed, there are good arguments for trying to designate a few places around the city specifically for skateboarders). But aggressive skateboarders have expropriated many of our public spaces for themselves. It’s time they gave them back.