Graduating Skatepark School

The Wire, Cover Story, May 19, 2004

A crew of three construction workers plugs away in the afternoon heat. “How do you want to cut this coping?” asks one worker. “We’ll have to cut it off on both ends and then throw another weld on the back tomorrow.”

The sun pounds down on the blacktop of the fenced-in lot. The incomplete pressure-treated skeletons of various terrain elements lie about the area: quarter-pipes, launch ramps, fun boxes, the gigantic carcass of an aboveground bowl. A steel handrail sits perched in the center of the lot, traversing a three-foot drop with no stairs in sight.
A truck is parked in the center of the lot. It’s a standard contractor’s job truck: a big, white, late-model Ford F150 XL with big aluminum racks built onto the bed for carrying ladders and supplies of wood. On the door are vinyl letters reading “SPC Skateparks, LLC.”

The crew looks much like any group of construction workers—except that there are no beer-bellies, tattoos are more prevalent, and, oh yeah, they’ve left a couple of skateboards strewn about the jobsite.

Tom Noble and his SPC Skateparks crew have been constructing skateparks for over a decade, all up and down the East Coast and as far afield as Florida and California. He has built parks around Maine in Sanford, Kennebunk, York, Bath and Ellsworth, as well as Newmarket and Rochester, N.H., and all over Massachusetts. Though the company does do some standard residential building and remodeling to keep up a steady stream of business, skatepark building is its mainstay.

Noble is riding a nationwide boom. New skateparks in the thousands have been built by municipalities over the past few years. Our region has seen them sprout in every large community, some good, some bad. Portsmouth, Dover, Newmarket, Hampton, Rochester and Newburyport all have municipal skateparks. Now Noble is putting the finishing touches on the latest addition—a $100,000 skatepark in Eliot, set for a grand opening on Saturday, May 22.

The Eliot Municipal Skatepark has been a long time in the making. In the spring of 2001, the skatepark was just a kernel of an idea, a project of Eliot Community Service director Brett Simmons, who was working toward its creation despite the fact that plans for a similar skatepark in the past had failed. This time, though, with skateboarding’s rising popularity and legitimacy as an alternative to organized team sports—several surveys show more kids skate than play basketball or baseball—the skatepark was approved. Plans were drawn up, initial surveying was done, and funds were raised from in-kind donations and grants.

Building a park is more complex than it might seem. Plans were originally set for the park to open last autumn, but construction delays stalled the process (though it’s nearly finished, if there are construction delays at this point, the opening will be pushed back to June 12). Now the lot between the Eliot Community Services building and the police department has been paved and fenced in. The terrain features, for the most part, need only their top sheets of plywood and a somewhat proprietary quarter-inch-thick layer of fiberglass-type material.

Having a skateboard-oriented contractor and ample input from skaters in the planning stages is key to building a successful park. Even if you have all the requisite elements—like halfpipes, bowls, quarterpipes and street skating features—most general contractors won’t be able to take into account the subtle nuances such as feel and flow that can make the difference between an excellent facility brimming with skaters and a deserted dud.
Eliot has listened to input from local skaters and used a skate-oriented contractor. Dover’s park, though underfunded, seeks advice from local skaters. Mark Hutton is the owner of Red Alert Skateshop in Dover. He’s worked with the city over the years to upgrade the skatepark in Henry Law Park. Every year, Hutton and a group of

local skaters go to the municipality to propose improvements and do the construction themselves. This year they have finally convinced the city to remove the two inner walls of the unused and dilapidated hockey rink, giving the skatepark a good chunk of new square footage. Red Alert has tentative plans for three pro-team demos to visit the Dover Skatepark this summer and are also planning three or four contests (for more
information on the events, call 603-749-1762).

Portsmouth Skatepark is well used, but gets its share of complaints for being an uninspired concrete structure with annoying seams that was built without accounting for how it would feel to skate on.

As a comparison, Rye Airfield represents what can be done with a big budget and good business planning. Two years ago when construction was completed, the private, indoor park on Route 1 became one of the biggest and best skateparks in the world. The space consists of 50,000 square feet of halfpipes, wooden and concrete bowls, and various street areas.

Though skateboarding has been around since the 1960s, it’s obviously evolved over time. There are some 11 million skaters today, and the sport has grown by over 100 percent in the last five years alone. It’s become a phenomenon, with skaters in France and Brazil and Japan building skateparks and emulating American skateboarding culture. Skate pro Tony Hawk’s mom has long since stopped telling him to get a real job that pays the bills—Sports Illustrated has estimated he’s earned roughly $10 million a year over the last few years—and he probably won’t be too upset if his kids don’t want to become accountants when they grow up.

The X-Games first brought skating into America’s living rooms in 1995 and spawned a revival in popularity that has made it a mainstream sport and big business. Nike alone spends millions of dollars sponsoring riders.

Skateparks have become big business as well. In the 1980s, if we wanted to skate a half pipe other than the one we had built in a friend’s backyard in South Jersey, we would have to get one of our older friends to drive us an hour to Cheapskates skatepark in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Cheapskates consisted of a rag tag collection of halfpipes and ramps in an old, dirty warehouse.

While Rye Airfield is currently considered the biggest and best indoor skatepark in New England—it’s not unusual for kids to travel from all over the East Coast to compete in contests and events—soon the undisputed star of skateparks in the region—perhaps the country—will be built in Boston.

When you think of the Big Dig, a skatepark doesn’t logically follow. The largest road-building project in the history of road-building has taken a 50-year-old major highway and buried it underground in a tunnel submerged in sections and stacked under train tracks, the Red Line central T station, and beneath the busiest section of Boston while at the same time adding the widest asymmetrical suspension bridge in the world. And though it’s just a small accounting item (less than 1 percent of the overall Big Dig budget), there is $95 million earmarked for restoration and renovation of greenspace to beautify the area, and that’s nothing to scoff at.

The skatepark will be located on the northern bank of the Charles River in Cambridge, next to the proposed North Point Park and underneath the elevated ramps in the heart of the Big Dig. Walking through the area, the most remarkable feature is the absence of the old elevated artery. Walking around downtown by the aquarium, the skyline is noticeably different. Or rather, it’s just noticeable. With the elevated artery removed there is an openness, a sprawling view of the city that you can’t find in other metropolitan settings. “You can’t see this much sky in other cities,” says Noah Stockman, project manager for the Charles River Skatepark.

The skatepark will be located on a one-acre plot amid parks and greenlands that will ring the entire New Basin area of the Charles River in the shadow of the Zakim Bridge and the Fleet Center.

The skatepark is a privately-funded, non-profit endeavor. Aside from the acre of land that was given to the Charles River Conservancy for the project, not a cent of the $95 million Big Dig money will go to the skatepark—it will all need to be raised from private sources. Forty thousand square feet of concrete bowls and ramps will be constructed by Wormhoudt, Inc., to the tune of $1.1 million.

Zack Wormhoudt is a superstar in the field of skatepark design and construction. Among the 50 skatepark projects he has been involved with in the United States is the 40,000 square foot park in Louisville, Kentucky built in 2002 that is widely regarded as the pinnacle of skateparks. The Louisville park is completely concrete with steel coping. It is amorphous and flowing, and the newly released design for the Charles River Skatepark looks just as good.

Boston has not been a very skater-friendly over the past few years. The city has been cracking down on skating, making it illegal to skateboard on the streets of Boston, but without providing much of an alternative. The two existing skateparks: in East Boston and Hyde Park, were poorly planned are not popular with area skaters. This park will change all that, and maybe change the image of skateparks in the region, making it easier for local parks to get the financial support they need.

Keeping kids off the streets—away from traffic, and off public and private property—is the main reason that municipal skateparks are popping up. When done right, they give skaters a place to hone their craft and hang out with friends where loitering is considered a good thing.