A Tough Grind

The task force met every month, working simultaneously on site selection and the park's design. Midway through the year, the city's Assets Management department had come up with a list of possible places. "We had a field trip," says Foster. "We chartered a couple of buses and checked them all out."

One location immediately emerged as the favorite. It was a one-and-a-half-acre parcel of empty land in Gates Crescent Park, right next to the Children's Museum. The site was bordered by I-25, a set of railroad tracks and the future location of Ocean Journey, which had yet to be built. "It was perfect," says Foster. But there was a problem: The Children Museum's board of directors was unwaveringly opposed to it and exerted enough pressure to kill the concept.

Foster is still fuming about it. "This park should have been built years ago," she says. "You know, adults pay a lot of lip service about doing things for kids -- remember, this is the Children's Museum we're talking about -- but it has to be the right kind of kids. The kids I was working with, they don't wear the Dockers and the polo shirts. They have the tattoos and the piercings and the spiked, colored hair and the chains and the pants down around their bottoms, so a lot of people assume they must be junior criminals or something. Well, they're not. They're athletes, and they deserve a place to practice their sport just as much as any football or soccer player."

After the first site was shot down, Mayor Webb offered an alternative. He proposed wrapping the skate park into his South Platte River Initiative by including it in the Commons Park redevelopment. The skaters were as much, if not more, in favor of the Commons Park area as they were of the space in Gates Crescent Park. But they faced another wave of opposition, this time from the new owners of luxury units in the Flour Mill Lofts, who complained that the skate park would generate too much noise. This was a dubious concern, because the Flour Mill building is separated from the skate park site by a set of train tracks and I-25.

"I think they just didn't want a bunch of skaters around," says Lewis.

At one public hearing, one of the loft owners said she had moved downtown for "peace and tranquility."

"If you wanted peace and tranquility, you should have moved to my district," snapped Foster. "We have a lot of nice, quiet cul-de-sacs for you."

In the end, Mayor Webb would not be swayed. "The mayor said, 'Enough, the park is going here,' says Foster. "I'm grateful for that."

By the time construction began on Denver's skate park last October, many of the original Skate Park Task Force members were in college, and they'd been replaced by a new crop of skater activists. "I told them when we started, 'The wheels of government grind ever so slowly,' but I never thought it would be this slow," says Foster.

Where municipal skate parks are concerned, the same story has played out in city after city, where many sites have been proposed and resisted by neighboring residents and business owners. In the last two years, public skate parks in New Orleans, Albuquerque and Hartford, Connecticut, opened only after torturous location-selection processes. Skate-park proposals in Fresno, Milwaukee, and several other large cities are currently bogged down in controversy. The result in many cases is that skate parks are kicked to out-of-the-way parcels of unattractive city property. The only public skate park in the country that comes close to Denver's in size and character is located in a rough-and-tumble Chicago neighborhood on that city's notorious South Side.

"The Chicago park is a good park in a bad location. The city just finally got so sick of people bitching about not wanting a skate park nearby that they just stuck it out there in Crackville, where nobody bitches about anything," Thatcher says. "The Denver park is in an awesome location. It's got a sweet view of skyline, it's right there on the creek, it's right off a major highway, and the new light-rail line will have a stop like a block away. It's amazing the city turned over such a prime piece of real restate to a skate park. It's unprecedented, really."

---

City of Denver park planner and landscape architect Mark Bernstein is wearing a hard hat decorated with skateboarding stickers. This is appropriate. Bernstein is the skate park's project manager, and he's as enthusiastic about its impending opening as Foster and the skateboarders who "test skate" the park frequently to ensure it's being built to the Skate Park Task Force's specifications.

"The angles all have to be perfect, every radius must be perfect, and the consistency of the surface has to be just right," says Bernstein, leading a tour of the park-in-progress. "It has to be smooth without being slippery. It's a very fine line when you're riding on a two-inch wheel."