Spohnranch has a new street plaza opening in the Inglewood neighborhood of Wilmington California. It’s replacing some prefab ramps with prefab concrete. They actually placed the whole park on the existing slab, traced it, and then cut out the concrete and laid the new pieces in place. They predict a lot of communities will be replacing metal and wood prefab parks this way as it allows them to avoid the expense of re-pouring all the flat. Seems like it would work fine for a street plaza. This one was co-designed by Paul Rodriguez Jr. and features replicas of LA spots including the DWP granite benches, Fairfield ledges and LA High banks. They have a Flickr stream of the installation and a short video that you can watch after the jump. Not much to it really. The park is located at 325 Neptune Ave, Wilmington, CA 90744. Opening ceremony is September 27
Short installation clips.
LOS ANGELES MAYOR ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSSA PROUDLY PRESENTS USA’S FIRST YOUTH STREET SKATE PLAZA WITH MAXWELL BILLIEON.
September 19, 2008: LOS ANGELES MAYOR ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA, LA CITY COUNCILPERSON JANICE HAHN AND ENTERTAINMENT EXECUTIVE MAXWELL BILLIEON HAVE TEAMED UP ALONG WITH SUPERSTAR SKATER, PAUL RODRIGUEZ JR. (P ROD) TO LAUNCH THE AMBASSADOR SERIES. AT ITS CENTER IS THE UNVEILING OF THE COUNTRIES FIRST DEDICATED STREET SKATE YOUTH DESTINATION SPOT, “AMBASSADOR PLAZA”. P ROD, WHO CO-DESIGNED “AMBASSADOR PLAZA”, STATED IN INTERVIEW, “MAXWELL BROUGHT ME IN TO LEND MY EXPERTISE AND IT’S AN HONOR TO BE APART OF SOMETHING SO MONUMENTAL”.
THE PREMIER LAUNCH EVENT, SLATED FOR SEPTEMBER 27TH FROM12PM TO 4PM WILL BE HOSTED BY MTV STAR, WILL GILBERT AND PROVIDE FREE PRODUCT AND ENTERTAINMENT TO OVER 500 YOUTH ATTENDEE’S.
“OUR GOAL IS TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO NEW MODELS IN OUR GLOBAL AT RISK COMMUNITIES! BEING AN AMBASSADOR EFFECTIVELY MEANS TO BRIDGE WORLDS TOGETHER AND FOR ME, THAT MEANS THAT HAVING ACCESS IS THE KEY. THROUGH ACCESS, OUR YOUTH HAVE MODELS OF WHAT CAN TRULY BE ACHIEVED”, SAID MAXWELL BILLIEION IN INTERVIEW WITH THE LA TIMES TODAY.
PROJECT PARTNERS INCLUDE SPOHN RANCH SKATEPARKS, Active, HAVOCTV, CANON CAMERA, NIKE, Nixon WATCHES, EMU BOOT CO., Plan B SKATE, DVS SKATE AND GIBSON GUITAR.
18 comments
sdafdsd
looks small
DaddyYo
hays and timdog:
Tell it boys!
Love to see the young kids chief to OGs.
Miller’s review is the basic Old Guy Skaters for Skateborder Only Skateparks party line. They think everyone should follow their tired insistance on Dog Town pool replica skateparks because they are old guys and use words like “leverage” when they mean “apply”.
Kilwag – since when did Oregon skateparks become so “diverse”? I’ve been told that I would never be allowed to skate an Oregon skatepark without Police protection. So don’t bust on the kid for exactly what your peers do.
Says:
September 29th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Kilwag
I can see the skatepark is doing wonders for the youth. Way to reprezent ZACK.
Don’t ever go to Portland to skate or we greet you with a friendly “hello,” show you where all the parks are, generally treat you with respect and have fun skating with you.
zack
you all are a bunch of poser babies. that park is great. dont ever go there or i’ll put a cap in your poser head
Larry
timdog, i think the chinese will soon be telling US what we eat is wack and we will be switching to rice, but anyway, that park seems like what alot of kids with “steez” want. alot of kids (not all but most) dont seem to want bowls. one of my local parks has a bowl that is basically only there to deposit garbage into the deep end and be vandalized with hat cool gang graffiti the kids like so much. at least we have places we can go, and they have places they can go.
Glenn
Last time I visited it the best bowl in the south east corner of the UK (Crawley) it was barely used except for the occasional BMXer using the mid-sized bit as a launch/jump ramp. The street section was packed solid, the large, carvable banked area may as well have been a pair of flatbanks as they were just being used for shuvits and failed kickflips.
Visit the only indoor vert ramp within 20 miles (Skaterham) and you’ll see 10 or so groms learning to ollie on it’s flat bottom.
Another park near here is all ledges and rails, a single flatbank being the only transition. I bet that’s EXACTLY what the kids asked for.
Not sure what i’m saying really, building transitions and re-education seems wrong, as does providing a crappy stair and kerb simulation. A little balance is needed maybe?
conahan
Mmm… melamine.
Mmm… ridiculously sized bowl. Seriously, I go to some skateparks and am reminded of that 12″-tall Stonehenge in Spinal Tap.
timdog
Could you imagine if we told the Chinese that eating rice is wack and that they would be way better off if they switched to dairy products as their staple because we thought we knew what was best for them? Disaster! I see thousands of dollars wasted on empty parks with well built, perfect transitions in towns where all they wanted was unique obstacles to session with their friends in a safe location, but some overly vocal, usually overly aged ripper wants to prove that he’s still a bad ass and must have a ridiculously sized bowl.It can be just as much fun to skate the twelve inch curb as the 12 foot cradle. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
hays
“it shows lack of commitment and creativity to the skateboarders who have to ride this crap on a daily basis.”
dude, I guess I missed you at those meetings where max billieon and janice hahn fought for the funding. and the meeting where aaron spohn agreed to build the park for free.
and you must have been in on phone calls when everyone said we crazy to build a park in one of the most violent neighborhoods in LA.
and I bet you’ve skated the area and seen that the typical skater and biggest user group of the park are hispanic kids between 12 and 16 years old. This park actually makes a difference in keeping kids out of gangs and jail. sounds clich
bk
The Ed Benedict skatepark/skate plaza project is currently under construction.
LA’s new prefab street plaza is perfectly NOT acceptable for any skatepark, street, bowls or otherwise. While it might be a cost effective measure to save dollars on a skatepark project, it shows lack of commitment and creativity to the skateboarders who have to ride this crap on a daily basis.
george
speaking of street plazas, new line, and oregon; what’s going on with Ed Benedict? Nothing on the SPS site and Taj doesn’t work for Parks anymore. Dead in the water?
Kilwag
Yeah the placement of that bench is bad news, Maybe it can be moved, if not, bad idea. The circular starting area looks like a traffic problem, hard to gauge if there’s enough run up for everyone to start in the middle, otherwise they have to start in the same place other people are trying to end up at. But then again, it was”co-designed” by a professional street skater, and those guys know what they want right? They never get it wrong.. right? (Damn, where’s that link when I need it.)
Regardless of the design, I still find the construction process interesting, and dare I say, perfectly acceptable for a street plaza. Flame on.
zed-word
I think the bench is placed there as a gap. Lame design, poor planning.
bjjpdx/Tom
maybe they could make it spin and put some carosel horses on it? Ive never seen a pre-fab park worth stopping for. Washington is riddled with prefab and they blow.
Tom Miller
That design should be rated “F” for failing basic skatepark design. Two flaws are apparent after just a second of review: collision factor (which BJJPDX/Tom caught right away) and the location of that bench in the lower right-hand corner. Good luck getting lines at that thing, never mind the cross-traffic.
Better still would be “R” for reject.
Seriously, it’s 2008. This is a 2001 kind of conversation. There should be no tolerance for failing skatepark design 101 like this.
I’ll leave on a more positive note: hire New Line to design your plaza. As an Oregonian I’m all for more work for my fellow Oregonian skatepark design/build teams. But none has proven competence in plaza design. So hire New Line until an Oregonian firm proves its competence.
colin
i’m glad i waited before i said, “that thing looks pretty sweet!”
heath
To be blunt… it looks like poo poo.
BJJPDX/Tom
I picture lots of collisions in the center of that thing.