Skateboarders will finally have a place to roll, jump and fly in Eastwood this fall after eight years of delays.
One of those who will celebrate is Neil Kraus, 22, who has been on the neighborhood SkatePark Research Committee since he was 14. “Even if I can never skate because I’m too old, I plan to be involved with it,” Kraus said.
The city plans to start taking construction bids on the skatepark at the end of March with the goal of opening the park in the fall, said Glen Lewis, the project coordinator from the city’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Youth Programs.
The skatepark will be located in the Eastwood neighborhood in Huntington Park on Caleb Avenue behind the Huntington School. The skatepark has a streetscape design, serving as a place for skateboarders to skate and as a multi-use facility for community meetings and concerts. The skatepark would also have a bike lane connecting the parts of Caleb Avenue the skatepark would interrupt.
The project is funded by $150,000 in construction funds from a New York State grant, $50,000 from the city and a $5,000 grant from the national Tony Hawk Foundation, created for professional skateboarder Tony Hawk to help fund skateparks in low-income neighborhoods. In addition, the skatepark committee raised over $5,000 from fundraisers and t-shirt sales.
The idea for the skatepark started in summer 2005 when Eastwood resident Judy Lewis and her husband visited a skatepark in Sodus Point, N.Y., and ran into skateboarder Jamie Notar Thomas, who had tried in the 1980s to get one started in the neighborhood. With Thomas’s encouragement, Judy Lewis approached the Eastwood Neighborhood Association about creating a committee to look into building a skatepark.
“You could just see skateboarders needing a place to do their sport,” said Lewis, who eventually became the director of the Skate Park Research Committee.
But the project faced multiple delays. It faced challenges in getting funding, for example. The Eastwood Neighborhood Association applied for state funding three times before its application was finally accepted. The city’s parks and recreation department had to check on whether the project interfered with Native American heritage artifacts, whether there were leftover parts of the former public swimming pool that used to be at the proposed site and whether the ground could support the skatepark’s concrete. All of that took eight years, said city officials.
Some neighbors still express concern about the design of the skatepark. Mike Behnke, facilitator of the Eastwood Tomorrow’s Neighborhoods Today group, said the TNT group voted for a staffed, lighted and secure skatepark but got a skatepark that is open and without supervision. “It’s going to be isolated, not staffed, not fenced in,” said Behnke.
But members of the skatepark committee defend the design. “The goal,” said Judy Lewis, the skatepark committee’s director, “ is to give skateboarders a place to do their sports and also to have it as a multi-use facility.”
(Madina Toure is a graduate student in magazine, newspaper and online journalism.)
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