I missed posting this in time, but apparently Rockwell Park in Bristol, Connecticut opened on Sunday. It’s an 18,000 SF street plaza and bowl built by California Skateparks. It’s open 24-7, no fee to skate and bike-free as well. ESPN was supposed to throw a party. – Thanks to Bill Helene for sending in these pre-bash photos.

The new Grindline park in Yakima Washington looks good. Lots of pool coping on the bowls a large size street area that looks like a departure from your typical Northwest-style street area. Check out the picks on the Grindline site. [Source: Earth Patrol Media]

As part of Portland’s 19 skatepark master plan, the Steel Bridge site was chosen for the main Regional Facility, or essentially, the destination park. The official Parks & Rec definition: Regional Skatepark: A regional facility will be a single large facility (>40,000 square feet) that will accommodate many users at once. It could be lighted and possibly serve as a venue for competitions. This type of facility will not be located in residential areas. Steel Bridge is supposed to be our Louisville, in terms of square footage and drawing power. Our landmark skatepark, not that anything could replace Burnside in the skateboarding public’s eyes. The City of Portland has started accepting proposals – the RFP is posted. You need to be a registered vendor to view the related documents. The list of registered vendors (as far as skatepark building companies is concerned) appears to only contain Dreamland, New Line and surprisingly, Wally Hollyday Design. (UPDATE: Found another – Artifex.) The rest of you need to get your paperwork in order because the bid closes on january 9th of 2009. Also confusing, there’s an item marked Estimate:$50,000.00, which isn’t going to buy much. Perhaps Mr. Miller will enlighten us. Flame on!…

As part of the ongoing beautification of the waterfront and adjacent areas of Portland, the Burnside project is getting more real estate. Eventually it will butt up against some new parks facility and thus scenes like this mom chatting on her cell phone while she drops the kids off at Burnside wil lbecome more and more of a reality. I don’t know if Burnside will get any cold hard cash, but the land grab has already started. There’s a panorama of some recent tranny work after the jump.

Let me introduce my friend Eric. The reason I call him my friend is because when I asked him if he would like to be sponsored, he replied “I have skateboard. How about we just be friends?” My reply was “Cheap and easy. Lets get married.” Every time I go to Newberg, Eric is skating doing some weird ass trick I wish I could do. If my hard drive didn’t crash this video would be 3x longer and 6x better. Who the hell knew the hard drive needs a back up? Who backs up the back up? Pose off  Grover 

The ongoing concrete work in Hood River, Oregon is looking really interesting, at least from afar. This is a shot of what looks like a bridge over a creek that has one side with a steep tranny wall, almost like a modified Jersey barrier. I assume this is connected to the rest of the new skate trail that’s being built. Actually, I should stop making assumptions and make the drive out there to check it out. Carl Warren has the picture, and you can click to enlarge.

Went by Ed Benedict to see the progress. They finished the quarters opposing the shots Kilwag got earlier. They seemed to be finishing up a lot of smaller sections of the park. It seems like it might be a while before it opens. Enjoy these awful cellphone shots..

I’m thinking of changing the name of this site to “Skatepark Construction Pictures and Annoy.” It’s just a phase, I promise. The Team Pain park in Colorado Springs is getting closer to being done. Check it out on Concrete Disciples.

Hello from G.P.K. (Grover’s Photo Korner) I went to so-cal and the skating is lame except for a few parks you know which ones… They are Encinitas, Clairemont, but you can only ride those certain hours and you pay every where except W.S.V.T. Oh yeah they also have a state wide age minimum of 6 years and above, so my son also learned to lie on his trip to California. Yes “to lie” not “to ollie.”

An anonymous party painted over a graffiti covered bowl in the Corvallis, Oregon skatepark a few weeks ago. It was a solid one color job that covered existing graffiti, including the usual genitalia and swastika nonsense. When the city eventually got around to cleaning it themselves, they were annoyed and/or potentially embarrassed to find that the park users had taken matters into their own hands. They plan on spending an estimated $500 to remove it, an the police are treating it as an act of vandalism. Brilliant! Way to instill a sense of pride and community. I imagine the local activist group, the Benton County Skateboarding Alliance will have something to say about this. I leave it to them to take action, but we’ll report here if anything noteworthy happens. Fight the good fight! – Thanks to Danimal and Joesf for the tip. [Source – Corvallis Gazette-Times]