A Tough Grind

The city of Denver's park, then, is a hybrid: an officially designated place to skate, but without supervision, leaving the skaters to make and enforce their own code of conduct and to skate as they wish, each to his own level of risk. Likewise, the park was designed by and for Denver skaters from both the new school of skateboarding -- mostly younger skaters who favor open space with "street" elements like rails, curbs, ramps and steps that mimic a city plaza -- and old-school riders who prefer the vertical liftoff of bowls and half-pipes that simulate empty swimming pools, first discovered by skaters during the 1975 drought in California.

"When we first got started, the old-school skaters on the task force wanted nothing but full pipes and twelve-foot bowls, and the new-school kids wanted two acres of stairs and railings," says Thatcher. "Once we worked it all out, we came up with a park that's about half and half, which is perfect, because the older skaters can rip the street terrain, and the bowls give the kids something to work up the courage and skills to try." Thatcher drew up the final plans for the park, though he says his schematics were a direct translation of the input from the Skate Park Task Force. "I put their vision on paper. I wasn't the designer of this park so much as the interpreter for the skaters of the Denver area."

Charly Lewis was one of those skaters. "The most amazing thing to me is, the city let us do this our way," he says. "They actually listened to a bunch of kids with skateboards."

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Girded in a power suit and seated behind a polished conference table in her City Hall office, 57-year-old Joyce Foster looks absolutely nothing like a skateboarder. But she certainly sounds like one. "If you just want to grind, you can grind. If you want to catch big air, you can catch big air," she says. "This park has so much street, and so much vert, you can skate any style you want -- old school, new school, whatever."

Foster's eyes glitter when she talks about her pet project of more than four years. She considers her effort to push the skate park through to be her greatest achievement in eight years on the Denver City Council. "I think I've done a lot of very important, interesting things in this city, but this has been the most exciting and fulfilling for me, personally. The more prejudice we encountered, the more committed I became."

There's a rumor going around among Denver skateboarders that the reason Foster took up their cause is that she was given a ticket for riding her bicycle on the Sixteenth Street Mall and felt similarly put upon by rules and regulations. It's a good story, but it's not true. "I just got tired of hearing that the solution to the illegal skateboarding problem was to keep raising the fines," she says. "I got tired of the small-minded perception of these kids. I think this city needs to reach out to its youth and find out what they really want, and what a lot of kids in this city really wanted was a skate park. So I just decided, come hell or high water, we're going to build them one."

Her crusade began in January 1997, when Foster chaired the city council's public parks subcommittee. Palomino Euro Bistro had just opened in Skyline Park on the Sixteenth Street Mall, and the restaurant's owners came to the city council to ask permission to expand their outside seating into a concrete plaza frequented by skateboarders. "They wanted to enhance their amenities by infringing upon kid space," says Foster.

Skateboarding on the mall was illegal, then as now. Still, skaters protested Palomino's plans. Foster made them a promise. "I told them, 'I am going to support this restaurant's request, but I promise you, I will work to provide a place for kids to skate in this city.' And they went, 'Yeah, right.'"

But Foster immediately honored her pledge. Her office contacted the administrators of every high school and middle school in the Denver public-school system and asked them to ask two or three skateboarders in each class to contact Foster about designing a skate park. Within a week, she had eighty names and phone numbers (including Charly Lewis's). The first meeting of the Skate Park Task Force was held later that month in the basement of the main branch of the Denver Public Library. Foster asked the heads of several city departments to attend. Assets Management, Public Works, and Parks and Recreation were all in the house. Many of the skaters present had bench warrants for their arrests for unpaid trespassing tickets.

Foster remembers, "I told the kids right off, 'This is going to be a lesson in civics you won't get in school. You are going to have to answer the questions of government people: How are we going to get the money? How are we going to get the land?'"