Different suburb, different take.

I hooked up with House of Neil and his friend Mark to skate one of the newer concrete parks in Chicagoland. Northbrook is also a well off suburb, and they took a different approach to building a skatepark for their community. It’s part of a massive athletic complex that you pretty much have to drive to get to. There’s baseball fields, batting cages, soccer fields, a golf course and a fishing pond. You can even get pole on loan from the golf pro shop if you want to drop a line in. So theyt spent some money on this park, but how does it skate?

Techny Prairie Park Skatepark – Northbrook Illinois

The panoramas have a few glitches. I’m working on a slow laptop with a small display, so this is what you get. Rest assured there are no huge kinks in the coping as seen in the bottom of panorama number three. Likewise, there were no headless skaters as seen in panorama two.

In a lot of ways this park reminds me of Newberg. It’s got a spread out mellow area that flows into deeper and deeper areas. Metal coping covers about 80% of the lip, the rest has none. There’s a big hump in the middle that kind of mimics a spillway. There are some fun ramps, ledges, and bumps around the outskirts as well. The big bowl is connected to the rest of the park by a channel that is a rounded off hump.

After the last two parks, it was nice to be back on some concrete. I had a lot of fun, and the lines were easy to find and keep your speed. Design-wise they did a good job for multiple skill level park. There a few things that could have made it better, like a pump bump in the middle of shallow side because there’s a bit too much flat. Your runs usually end up petering out back in that end. A pump bump would open it up. There’s also the matter of a poorly placed rail that will kneecap you get lost in the flow. You can see it below. But for the most part, the design is sound.

Over beers after the session, Neil and Mark asked me how I liked the park and I told them pretty much the same thing, then I asked if they wanted the Northwest critique, and they did, so here it is:

The coping sucks. It’s looks like it’s stainless steel, and it’s slippery as you might imagine. Furthermore, it’s not set right anywhere, with the possible exception of about a three foot stretch in a corner. Elsewhere it ranges from merely not sticking out enough to nearly recessed. The transitions in the big bowl are kind of washed out, and in some places slightly kinked. There’s one spot in the mid bowl where they botched the finish and it’s noticeably washboarded, almost like running over the wake up bumps on the side of a highway. The undeniable badge of shame is the shoddy finishing job in the two deepest corners. You can see the exposed aggregate in the picture below. The corners are not a result of weathering either. The defects were present on opening day. They have attempted to patch it somewhat, and it doesn’t ride as bad as it looks. Still, that’s just inexcusable for brand new park.

Word is that this is a Site Design park, but they aren’t claiming it on their web site. Neil had heard that the city had given them a short time to work on it with a fixed deadline, so they had essentially ran out of time. It would be hard to dispute that based on all the visual evidence.

One of the hubba ledges backs up against the transition in two spots creating an extenison… sort of. You can ride up it easily enough, but it doesn’t quite back up against the transition, which creates a hell of hangup on the way down. The picture makes it look a little less severe than it actually is.

But did I have fun? You bet. I’d go back there without a second thought. In a previous post there was discussion comparing it to Wilson in Chicago. I haven’t been there in four years or so, so I can’t make a truly informed comparison, but from what I remember, Wilson is much larger and doesn’t have any of the glaring errors that Northbrook does. There’s also a the pool replica and the really large street section that dwarfs the street offerings at Northbrook. One thing about Wilson that I do remember is that all the transitions seemed to be about the same, so in that sense it was kind of sterile. Northbrook has the advantage of being somewhat more organic. However, it’s all pretty small, and I can’t even consider the deep bowl in the equation because I can’t get past the half-assed finishing job. I did have a little breakaway session with a couple guys there and I could see that it had potential. It’s a shame they didn’t have enough pride in their work to actually finish the job. Even if it were finished well, I’d be complaining about the washed out transitions.

There’s a nice set of banks right next door to the skatepark. Trouble is, they are inside the batting cages.

Here’s six feet of the most useless coping you’ll ever see. You might be able to grind it, but only if your wheels fall off during the attempt.

All complaints aside, it’s still fun. Could have been better, but considering the rest that greater Chicagoland has to offer, it’s second only to Wilson, as of this date, at least.