Anthony Abney is trying to
nail a sweet trick on his skateboard.
He sails down a ramp trying
to gain enough momentum to propel his jump over a short set of stairs
that could be the docking bay of a shopping market.
But Abney isn’t riding on
the sidewalk aggravating security guards, grinding paint off handrails
or colliding with pedestrians on ramps. He’s in a specially designed
skate facility at Lake Vista Park, built in 2005 by the city of St.
Petersburg, Fla., to mimic the features found in front of a typical
retail or business store.
“It’s nice to go someplace
we won’t get kicked out of,” said Abney, 15, one of a dozen skaters
swarming across the pavement on a recent Friday afternoon.
More and more cities are building
skate parks similar to Lake Vista’s. The goal is to minimize injuries
and destruction to private property, said park officials. But increasingly,
it’s skaters themselves who are pushing for the construction of public
skate parks, seeking to propel the formerly underground sport into the
mainstream.
Some older skaters lament the
taming of the sport. But others, including some of skating’s most
prominent national figures, say the new parks will make skating accessible
to a broader segment of American kids.
Two skate parks have been built
in St. Petersburg in the past three years, and a third is now planned
for the Walter Fuller Recreation Center.
“Across the board cities
and counties are building them,” said Eleanor Womack, the executive
director of the Florida Recreation and Park Association Foundation.
“They’re the most popular addition to parks these days.”
State
sponsored skate parks
A key factor driving the popularity
of skate parks in Florida is a 1999 state law designed to encourage
their construction.
Officials had long wanted to
build such parks as a way to steer reckless skaters away from places
where they would cause a disturbance. Before the skate facility at Lake
Vista Park opened, for example, skaters would careen around the entrance
to the park’s recreation center.
“Parents would complain,
‘They’re running over my kids!’ ” said Barbara Walton, a supervisor
at Lake Vista Park. “It was improper.”
But cities were wary of installing
skating facilities because of the prohibitive costs of insurance, said
Alexa Shooter, from the St. Petersburg Parks Department. The new state
law exempted cities from potential liability suits, Shooter said, making
it easier to build structures on which minor cuts and bruises are norm.
Freedom from lawsuits also
allowed cities to open parks that appealed to skaters – because it
allowed parks to operate without “pad nannies,” or park supervisors.
Skaters clamored for the construction of city-run parks.
“We have a lot of teenagers
in St. Pete, and we had a lot of requests from them to have their own
skate parks,” Shooter said. “That’s how it started. They asked
and we did what we could.”
The city’s first skate facility
opened at Fossil Park in 2003, followed by Lake Vista’s last year.
Lake Vista’s skate facility
is an 8,400-square-foot concrete island in the midst of the park’s
jogging trails, baseball fields and tennis courts. The skating area
features concrete stairs, metal railings and steep inclines for building
speed.
A year-long membership is $20,
but skaters can pay $3 a day to use the park. However, it’s as difficult
to make sure visitors have paid as it is to enforce the use of pads
and helmets, said Walton, the supervisor at Lake Vista.
“The city’s not going to
pay for someone to sit out there,” she said.
The skate park is difficult
to monitor because it sits out of view from the windows of the park’s
offices, Walton said. An employee is sent out to check perhaps three
times a week. Walton said that’s not enough to deter rule-breaking.
“Helmets are a concern, but
they’ll take them off after we go away, assuming they even bring them
at all,” she said. “They have no fear, those fools.”
But the lack of authority at
Lake Vista is exactly why skaters enjoy going there, said Sean Brabham,
19. The approach taken by the city’s other skate park has shown that
too many rules can turn off skaters.
“People stopped going to
Fossil for a while because cops would hand out tickets for not wearing
helmets,” he said. “Here, we don’t get bothered too much.”
Skaters helping
skaters
Aging skaters themselves are
pushing for the development of public skate parks, opening the sport
to more people than before.
“I think it’s allowing
skateboarding to grow, particularly with the girls and little children,”
said Heidi Lemmon, the executive director of the Skate Park Association.
“When it was illegal,”
Lemmon said of skating’s early days, “you had to go out at night
and that limited people from skating. But skate parks have opened the
doors to everybody.”
America’s most famous skateboarder,
Tony Hawk, is leading the movement to drag skateboarding out of the
shadows. Hawk, considered the pioneer of modern vertical skateboarding
and whose computer-animated likeness is the character of several popular
video games, created a foundation to promote the construction of skate
parks in cities across the country.
According to the foundation’s
Web site, the foundation has donated $1.3
million to help support and partially fund 291 public skate parks since
2002 through special events, grants and technical guidance.
The foundation says its goal
is to help skate boarders shed the stigma of disrespectful troublemakers,
envisioning a day when the sport is part of the Summer Olympics. Hawk
writes on the site that he hopes to “give kids a positive outlet for
energy, and a safer community for them to grow up in.”
Authentically
fake
As popular as skate parks such
as Lake Vista’s have become, some hard-core skaters turn up their
noses at the movement. They say it’s not real skating.
“It’s weird,” said Philip
Toye, 19, shaking his head as he watches a boy five years younger pick
himself off the ground. “Some kids, all they know about skating are
these skate parks.”
Toye remembers a time when
there were no skate parks in St. Petersburg. Before the city had skate
parks, he says, skaters were forced to roam around town. They risked
harassment from local authorities and business owners as they searched
for prime locations to perform tricks.
To Toye, skating at a skate
park can’t replace the thrill of skating on a busy urban street. And
it doesn’t require the skill necessary to pull off a trick before
security chases you away from a place you’re not supposed to be.
“It’s the little things,
like the cracks or bumps in the sidewalk relative to each spot that
can affect you mentally – little distractions you notice before you
jump,” he said. “It takes a whole different level of skill.”
Skater Tom Zam also laments
public skate parks as a one of many signs that the sport is departing
its shadowy roots. An increasing number of big corporations are entering
the market for skating gear, and tournaments are commonly broadcast
on television.
“It used to be like punk
rock, man. Underground. Anti-establishment,” said Zam, 30, who owns
the Finest Skate Shop in St. Petersburg. “Skate boarding is all about
having fun and going out and getting hated on by the cops and business
owners. It’s an energy rush. Boom!”
Tito Parrata, director of Team
Pain, the design and construction company behind the skate park at Lake
Vista and other parks across the country, said he tries to keep such
concerns in perspective. Parrata, 32, said he began skating on backyard
ramps and in the Florida streets of Orlando and Tampa after he turned
15.
“That was my background,
but that’s just not the case anymore,” he said. “Some people want
to stick to the past, well that’s fine. But the fact is this is the
future.”
As longtime skaters introduce
their children to the sport, they may prove Parrata right. As a first
step, they have already made skating family friendly.
Joe Sims, a heavily tattooed
30-year-old who has skated for 14 years, now finds himself taking his
4-year-old son to Lake Vista’s park.
Sims said his son may someday
choose to skate professionally or cause mischief skating downtown. Until
then, he said, skating will be purely a father and son experience for
them – just as other parents shoot hoops, toss a pig skin or play
catch.
Even Sims, who used to skate
on the street when he was younger, now prefers the public skate parks.
“When you get my age, you
don’t have much time to skate, so it’s nice to have one place to
go,” he said. “Skating is skating no matter where it is.”
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