How to Fight for a Skatepark – By Todd Taylor. Additional photos by Mary Clare Stevens Posted 5-28-08
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On paper, it sounds great: have the kids design their own park.
Purkiss-Rose design guy: “Use this sheet of paper. Draw anything you’d like.”
Fifty kids drew out their skate visions on the butcher paper provided. Some ideas were solid, but the impact of video games became apparent.
Purkiss-Rose design guy: “What’s that?”
Kid: “A car… on fire.”
Purkiss-Rose design guy: “Great. Draw it in. There are no bad ideas.”
Awesome. Not possible-but awesome.
Yet, when “car on fire” is given equal time consideration in skatepark design with diagrams and ideas shot back and forth between me and Thrasher’s finest, it’s more than a little disconcerting. El Beardo-one of the lead brains behind San Pedro’s Channel St. Project who I’d been filling in on all of the advancements-attended the meeting and felt like he’d come in too late in the process to change much. To him, it felt like minds had been made up, that we could fight for little design tweaks, but not how the skatepark would flow as a whole.
It’s funny. I felt the same, like all of the large decisions at every stage of the skatepark were done without-or even in direct defiance of-community members’ input. And I’d come in at the beginning of the design process. The City had an amazing talent of holding up a sign that, on one side, said, “Tell us your ideas! You’re important,” but on the back of the sign was scrawled “Take what we give you! It’s better than nothing.” And their sign was becoming more and more transparent.
Ask Professionals “You Get Paid for That?”
The Second Community Concrete Design Meeting
Let me point out here that everyone on The Highland Park Skate Park Coalition was a volunteer and spent over several hundred hours apiece staying on top of the situation throughout this entire process. (This included approximately twenty meetings on how to deal with The City.)
On the other side, Purkiss-Rose, a “design” company was paid tens of thousands of dollars to come up with a mostly baffling what-have-you.
Kudos for including a kidney bowl (think of a skatable pool without water: very fun). But they put a fence around it. Inside of a park that had a fence around it. Such a horrible idea. One, great, it feels more like a prison. Two, an interior fence in a skatepark effectively cuts off the “flow” from one area to another, making the park “feel” much smaller than its square footage. Weirdly, the selling point for the bowl by pro skater and Purkiss-Rose crony Frank Hirata was that it had a nautical theme. “You know, like the beach. That’s a lifesaver.” Jesus, dude, I thought. Where are your priorities?
Purkiss-Rose also introduced an “innovation” to what’s known as a skate pavilion. Instead of the traditional stepped tiers, they inverted the design, resulting in something that looked quite like a shallow toilet bowl. It was obvious to me that this feature would serve little more than a crash- up derby/kid-maimer since skaters coming from opposite directions-and not aware of one another-could end up in the center at the same time. No bueno.
Oh, I objected… how in the samhill was that even skatable, not to mention any good?
Perfect the Quiet Art of Tapping Out
The Fourth Smart Thing for a Skater to Do
When you get really fucking pissed at these meetings in public, use the buddy system. (This only works if you’re not both worked up at the same time.) The Ambassador and I had a simple system. If one of us was getting a little red, stammering, or on the verge of losing our shit, all we needed was a tap on the shoulder. We’d finish our sentence, stop, and collect ourselves.
But, The City was a little of ahead of us. It learned from its mistakes by making sure that, in subsequent community meetings, the only way a member of the general public could become a “speaker” at the meeting was to fill out a card prior to the meeting and then be restricted to two minutes.
Understand the Following Diagram: This Is My Thumb. This Is My Colleague’s Ass.
City Technique #6
I went to too many meetings. I went to meetings about meetings. It was during this grey time where more things broke loose, bit by painful bit.
Costs to make anything in L.A. are impenetrably high. The main culprit blamed was China. It seems that America’s on the losing end of that brilliant trade agreement, and every time The City showed us a blueprint, the cost of concrete and rebar kept shooting up. Los Angeles is a great place to live if you never have to pee or shit. Current price for a public bathroom in Los Angeles-nothing fancy, mind you-is $300,000. It’s $23,000 for security lights. $2,000 for a plaque (and the plaque holder) so you’ll never forget who held the purse strings, $110,000 for the guard shack, and the list goes on.
Members of the skatepark coalition attended an “emergency” mid-afternoon design meeting downtown-by The City’s request and on their schedule-only to find that the engineer who initiated the meeting wasn’t actually going to show up. When he was called by his staff and put on speaker phone, we discovered that he was in traffic, and apparently not headed toward the meeting. Graciously, he offered to “pull over and look at the plans.” My taxes pay that dude.
Tony Hawk pulled through for us. Here’s the Birdman’s haiku about the skatepark design at that moment (which still featured the toilet bowl): “This looks like a disaster waiting to happen. Bad design.” His foundation donated $1,000 to the skatepark.
We showed The City the fax. The design was fundamentally changed shortly after. Our councilman announced that an additional $500,000 had been allocated to the Garvanza Skatepark Project, stating that it was the direct result of the advocating of the skate park coalition and its supporters. He gave us a pat on the back.
More months passed. A mysterious “funding gap” opened up and prevented the park from being built.
And then… nothing.
Tumbling tumbleweeds. During this time, The City-an endless collection of departments and divisions-was in upheaval. Our councilman, Antonio Villaraigosa (who, in our direct dealings with the skatepark, is anything but the “democratic Latino superstar” he’s touted to be) became mayor. The bureaucratic deck was again shuffled.
How to Fight for a Skatepark – By Todd Taylor. Additional photos by Mary Clare Stevens Posted 5-28-08
This article was originally static html. Original comments can be found here.
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