Perhaps not many people are willing to make major life changes for the sake of skateboarding, but Louisville Mayor Dave Armstrong promotes the $2 million park as a means for attracting young people to his city. He hopes that some of those who visit Louisville for the skating from the far corners of the country--people have been known to fly in from Los Angeles, for example, just for a weekend of skating-- will decide to move there, perhaps to work at the city's nascent technology corridor on nearby East Main Street. "We're making a real effort to bring artists and bohemians to our downtown," Armstrong boasts.
Few other cities are pinning their economic development hopes on the concrete dips, vertical ramps and wooden half-bowls of their skateboard parks, but hundreds of them are building new skateparks anyway.
After a 1970s skateboarding boom--largely in California--fizzled out, in part because of liability concerns, there were only about a dozen parks left by the mid-1990s. Several states have since adopted laws holding cities harmless by adopting a "no lifeguard on duty" policy-- skaters skate at their own risk. Over the past five years, about 1,000 cities have built public parks, with another 2,000 parks to come in the next 18 months, according to the Skatepark Association of the USA.
The popularity of the sport has rocketed with televised events, notably ESPN's X Games, and the emergence of a breakthrough star in the person of Tony Hawk. Today, an estimated 9 million kids ride skateboards for recreation--on average, about three skaters for every Little Leaguer in a given town. "There was a pent-up demand for this type of facility," says Jim Randall of the Frankfort Square, Illinois, park district, which opened a skatepark in July. "The kids were everywhere--every public street, anywhere they could find a curb or bench they could grind on."
Now, between 50 and 150 kids a day are showing up at the town's skatepark, which keeps them safer by taking them off the streets and makes home- and business-owners happier. The Frankfort Square facility, which is maybe one-fourth the size of Louisville's, cost about $275,000 to build. Randall says he expects to have no maintenance costs. Like most public parks, the one in Frankfort Square is open without supervision or admission fees. The idea is to give the kids a place to go, not to make money.
Frankfort Square, like dozens of other communities, engaged the local skaters in the design and planning of its facility. No city wants to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a park its skaters will declare boring or too small and therefore not use. "I've heard the analogy that skateboards are kind of like golf courses," says Greg Benson, co-owner of TrueRide, a Duluth, Minnesota-based park builder. "They like to go to different parks, and no two should be alike." Los Angeles is building 13 "cookie-cutter" parks that local skaters are already predicting will stand empty. Although skaters would rather have a place devoted to their activity than get chased out of downtown plazas by police, they'll return to the streets rather than skate at a subpar facility.
In the way that some kids plan to spend their college years on campuses convenient to beaches and ski slopes, some young people today dream of matriculating near major skateparks such as Louisville's. "If he gets a scholarship, he'll come to the University of Louisville just for this park," says Linda Robinson of her son, Alex. "He's a straight-A student, so he might get a scholarship."
