How to Fight for a Skatepark – By Todd Taylor. Additional photos by Mary Clare Stevens Posted 5-28-08
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Placing Boulders in the Field of Dreams
When Landscaping Whispers “Fuck You”
It had been a dirt field for over two decades. Little bit of a slope. Before any attention was lent to it, almost every weekend, there’d be an elaborate handball game being played with ten middle-aged men on each side. I couldn’t ever figure out the rules of the game, but completely understood that The City didn’t want them pissing in the bushes that lined one side of the park. So, in an open field, one day, the city plopped a bunch of boulders in such a manner that a nice, wide field was totally unusable for any team sport. The boulders are hard to mow around and get tagged all the time.
In one of the corners of the field was the proposed site of the skatepark.
It was during this darkening time where, I said, many times, “Fuck it. I give up. I can drive fifteen minutes to another park.” I just didn’t feel like tilting any more windmills in the name of community service.
The dirt of the proposed skatepark remained untouched.
Eight months later, I got a call from one of the community members. The park was back up on the radar. The main change in plan was that the project was shifted into the Department of Engineering in an effort to save on costs. Not necessarily good news. The City had made one park previously, the only concrete skatepark in L.A. I’d already “had words” with dude in charge of its construction.
Me: “Robert, every time it rains, Pedlow park floods. Why aren’t there drains in it?”
Robert: “Drains are in that park.”
Me: “Okay, technically, but they aren’t hooked up to pipes.”
Robert: No answer.
Robert has since landed a promotion and advanced to another City job. Bravo.
The City had agreed that they would build the last agreed-upon skatepark plan. No one could disclose what the final compromise had been; it’d been sliced, diced, reconfigured, expanded, and contracted so many times that they could have built it any one of ten ways, depending on the date of the blueprints they were holding. No design was on display the day of the ground breaking ceremony.
What I do know is that $1.4 million doesn’t buy as much as you think it would in L.A. California Skateparks started construction, and after concrete had been poured, we were invited to have a look-see. The finalized plan was a compromise. At one time, the park was to be built in two phases. The end result is a little weird because it’s literally cut down to as big as the funds on hand. But, they made the bowl to spec. Peeling back the burlap over the curing concrete revealed a nice amoeba-shaped bowl-one of El Beardo’s recommendations that was an improvement on the kidney shape-six feet deep in the shallow and nine feet in the deep, terra cotta tile, with six inches of vert and Federal pool coping all around. Real close to what we’d asked for.
After the concrete cured, it was instantly getting carved.
I kept on visiting the park, walking around it, thinking of what it looked like in my mind versus what I was seeing, still expecting it to disappear like a dream.
When I was up the street, getting beer and soymilk, the checkout woman, who knows I skate asked, “Did you hear what happened to the park yesterday?”
“It’s finished,” I said. “It’s going to open soon.”
“No, not that. Two kids hotwired the Bobcats that the construction crews left overnight and were arrested by the cops while jousting them in the field next to the park.”
We both laughed. It’s par for the course in Highland Park. Kids are bored. As I walked back home, I stopped by the park, just to look at it. Someone had taken a paint roller and tagged the entire length of it. The front gate was spread aside like a curtain. Apparently, the six padlocks The City had placed on the chain link entrance weren’t enough to stop people from skating.
The natives were getting restless.
Days later, The City wised up and filled the park with sand, which thrilled the BMXers in the area.
Weeks passed and everything in a twenty-yard radius of the park got mercilessly tagged.
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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