City skateboarders want new digs.
Fred Berman has skateboarded intermittently for the past three decades. He grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s just 20 miles from Dogtown-the Los Angeles 'hood immortalized by pioneering skateboarders such as Tony Alva. But after moving to Santa Fe six years ago, Berman, now 39, fears the City Different will never spawn skateboarders as ***image1***talented as members of Alva's legendary Zephyr Team-the subject of current film release
Lords of Dogtown
.
According to Berman and others, Santa Fe is unfriendly to skaters. Street skating is largely out of the question. And the City's two skateboard parks, unusable in inclement weather, are situated in unsafe areas and poorly designed.
When Berman first moved to Santa Fe, he dropped by the park located on Camino Carlos Rey. The visit left him puzzled. "I noticed the kids only skated 20 percent of the park, and I wondered 'why is that?'" he recalls. "I'd go to other parks in Albuquerque and California, and I'd see kids ripping it up, and why did I find that kids aren't doing that here? The parks weren't designed or built very well."
Steve Chrisman of the Skate School, which offers skateboarding instruction, says the City's other skate center, in DeVargas Park, is particularly bad. "The concrete finish work is substandard. There are gaps two inches thick." This makes it difficult for skaters to gain momentum. While the Skate School offers skateboarding lessons and a space for kids to skate, the facility cannot accommodate more than 20 skaters at a time.
"I skate everyday, all day. Sometimes I ditch school just to skate," James McGuire, a 17-year-old Santa Fe High student, says. McGuire favors the Santa Fe High campus, the Sweeney Convention Center and the PERA building in the Capitol complex. However, he can't spend much time in any one of those locations. "It's hard to skate in Santa Fe," he says. "In so many places, you get kicked out for skating." McGuire also skates in the City's parks. But this winter's heavy snowfall eliminated the parks as an option during much of the school year. Accordingly, McGuire and his girlfriend, Tashia Ortiz, also a skater, would like the City to build an indoor skate park. Gerard Martinez of the City's Parks and Recreation Department says such a move would be expensive.
A new outdoor park might be more realistic. Seth Cox, manager of Beyond Waves, a surf and skate supplier, is gathering with skaters to petition the City to build a new park. "I think they put them in the worst possible places," Cox says of the City's existing parks. "They just don't feel safe. Guys are selling drugs or whatever, and kids are around." Adds Berman, whose dream site for a new park is the Genoveva Chavez Center, "A lot of parents don't like to drop their kids off. The one on Camino Carlos Rey is full of graffiti and profanity."
Martinez says he's hard pressed to understand skaters' outcry. "The skateboard community was really involved with the location and designs of the parks," he says. Nonetheless Martinez says Parks and Rec indeed has been looking into developing a new park at the site of Santa Fe Place (formerly Villa Linda Mall). "We are strongly looking at doing an above ground, skateboard facility," he says. In a year or two plans to build the park will solidify, according to Martinez.
If it happens, Berman says, it's important to have a company with skateboarding expertise construct and design the potential park. "What those companies do is more like skate sculpting," he says. They build the park in portions and actually skate the parts constructed before moving on to another section."
But Berman says skateboarders aren't aiming for the City to spend loads of money on a new park. "We actually want to participate in fundraising," he explains. "We really want to get totally involved and come up with something that's high quality."
