'Board Meeting

Park Place: Aerial view of the site of the proposed Schuylkill River Skatepark. : Image courtesy of Anthony Bracali Architecture

Skaters and architects ramp up for a landmark skate park.

by Brian Howard

It's a Friday night in January at the Connelly lecture hall on the eighth floor of the University of the Arts' Terra Building. To look at the room, you'd think you'd walked in on detention. Kids in grungy hoodies and baggy pants slouch in the auditorium seating. Adults, some nattily attired, others dressed as casually as the kids, mill about in the front of the hall. A frail but dignified white-haired man in a black topcoat is helped by two younger men to a seat in the front row.

The strange truth of it is that everybody wants to be here. They've come to this community outreach meeting to discuss a city-endorsed skate park.

This meeting, one of several around the city in the last month, was called by architect Anthony Bracali and the rest of the team assembled to design a skate park along the Schuylkill in the shadow of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With Bracali at the front of the room sits David Schaaf from the city Planning Commission, Brian Nugent from the SkateNerd shop at Sixth and Spruce streets, Frank Hirata from skate-park designers Purkiss Rose, and others ready to answer questions and, more importantly, solicit ideas for what this joint venture between the city and skateboarders should and could be.

The project was born in the aftermath of the city's 2002 boarding ban at the skater mecca Love Park. Josh Nims, then a law student at Temple University, helped spearhead it. "As a young law student, I got wound up," explains Nims, now the director of Franklin's Paine Skatepark Fund nonprofit. "I went to hearings and made statements. If you're going to legislate [against skating at Love Park] you have to make [other] facilities. There are tens of thousands of skateboarders in the city, and FDR park is as far away from Center City as you can be and still be in city limits."

Surprisingly to some, the city listened. According to Maxine Griffith, the city's secretary for strategic planning and executive director of the Planning Commission, the mayor and several members of the Planning Commission have kids who skateboard. She calls Schaaf, who's heading this project for the city and whose skateboarding son, Neil, has also been consulted, "the prince of skateboarding." (Nims calls him "Philadelphia skateboarding's best friend.")

The city helped select the site, pledged to fund the design process (in the neighborhood of $100,000, Griffith says) and promised to back the project to help Franklin's Paine secure financing through corporate sponsorship (at least $2 million, Griffith figures).

But this is tricky business. Municipalities have a spotty history when it comes to constructing parks that skateboarders actually want to use. Lack of understanding of what skateboarders like and what they look for when they skate often results in a series of prefab ramps and rails with no logical flow that become as underused as the municipal tennis courts they often replace. The idea of holding this and other meetings is part of the reason Bracali got the gig.

At this point, there are no designs, just grand visions for a revolutionary urban space. Bracali, something of an architectural wunderkind, is exploring sites like Love, San Francisco's Embarcadero and the Brooklyn Banks, urban spaces that weren't entirely successful at their intended purposes, "places that had been recaptured by the activity of skateboarding," he explains later on the phone from his office.

The feedback from meetings like this (others were held the next day, Jan. 29, in Northern Liberties, and South and West Philadelphia) will propel a pair of preliminary designs to be presented next month.

After a PowerPoint-style presentation detailing the lay of the land, slope analyses and sightlines in and out of the park, the lights come up and the floor opens.

"Will the park be good for filming tricks?" asks one skater.

"Will this be engineered so that things will occur naturally?" asks another. "How will you incorporate as many design elements as possible without turning this into a design trainwreck?"

"Will there be outlets" for photo equipment, asks yet another.

The boarders did their homework.

To lend a sense of perspective to the proceedings, Nugent explains, "This is not going to be everybody's dream site." Too many skate parks try to be all things to all skaters, he explains, and wind up being nothing to any of them.

"We want this to be something you discover," chimes Nims from the audience. "Key to skateboarding is the idea of discovery."

After more discussion and references to parks in Barcelona and Queensland, Australia, one of the men who escorted the older gentlemen into the room raises his hand and introduces his older colleague.

While the man's presence makes little impression on the skateboarders, it's clear it means something to those in the front of the room.

"I'm the guy who did Eakins Oval," barks the man. "I came here because I had serious concerns, and because, quite honestly, I thought you'd probably mess it up. But I'm deeply impressed with your approach."

And though this thumbs-up from Edmund Bacon, elder statesman of Philadelphia urban design and longtime proponent of skateboarding in the city, was not requisite, a palpable sense of relief that this landmark project has been duly blessed fills the room.