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26 Illinois Parks and Recreation SPECIAL FOCUS Portable Skate Parks
Skate parks drop-into Chicago neighborhoods
By Katherine Gierut McGuire In October of 2000, the Chicago Park District opened a beautiful new skate park at Burnham Park along the city's lakefront. With a generous offering of obstacles like quarter-pipes, fun-boxes and grinding rails, the park became wildly popular, attracting as many as 500 skaters a weekend. As spring melted the snow and the boarders came out to play, the park district saw that this new skate park was pulling in crowds from as close-to-home as Dearborn Park on the city's near south side to as far away as the northwest suburb of Crystal Lake, some 60 miles away. Although the park was getting a lot of use, it was apparent that the demand for skating space definitely outweighed the site's capacity. And some skaters were looking for something closer to home and continued to use their local buildings and parking lots as tools of their sport. "There just aren't enough locations in the city where boarders can safely enjoy their sport and socialize without receiving the angry glares of people who consider them a menace," says David Doig, general superintendent of the Chicago Park District. "So we took the opportunity to scout out locations in the neighborhoods where skating is popular, and bring a skate park to them." In mid-June of last year, the park district unveiled two new $40,000 portable skate parks located in local neighborhoods. One was placed in a park located on Chicago's north side at Warren Park, 6601 N. Western, the other on the south side at West Lawn Park, 4233 W. 65th Street. These sites offer skating at the affordable price of $2. The 80-by-80-square-foot mobile parks were built with the same creativity as the lakefront skate park, featuring six-foot quarter pipes, a combination pyramid, street spines, launches and grind rails. The portable parks are made from wood, while the skate park on the lakefront is made from cement and features more apparatus.
Project managers assessed the existing parks and made room for one of the most popular sports today by adapting and resurfacing sets of infrequently used tennis courts and developing user friendly skate park areas. This creative reuse of existing land made the park amendable to the trends of today's families and brought more skaters off the streets and into the park. If the trends of the community change, these portable parks can be dismantled and moved to new locations. "At the park district we are always interested in keeping abreast of the leisure trends of families today," says Doig. "These two portable skate parks are just the first step in adapting some of our older facilities to make them fun and user friendly for today's more intense sports."
Katherine Gierut McGuire January/February 2002 17 |
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