Riverside Skate Park

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108th st Riverside Skate Park, New York, NY

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The Riverside Skate Park, located on 108th Street in upper Manhattan, is a mecca for skateboarders and in-line skaters from all over the New York metropolitan area. Built by teenagers, in collaboration with a non-profit educational center (the Salvardori Educational Center for the Built Environment) and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the skate park is maintained and administered by the skaters, and gives a feeling of community and self-respect to what typically might be an alienated group.

Project Background

In the early 1990's, Charles McKinney, administrator of Riverside Park, was looking for a way to address the recreational needs of adolescents, a group he says is underserved and systematically designed out of public spaces. "The failure to provide recreation is one cause of adolescent frustrations and feelings of being an outsider," states McKinney. As Riverside was in the midst of a restoration, underused facilities were being identified as sites specifically for a teen project. At about this time, Andy Kessler, a native New Yorker and an avid skateboarder, contacted the New York Department of Parks and Recreation with a proposal to build a park for skateboardersand in-line skaters. McKinney liked the idea and asked the Salvadori Educational Center on the Built Environment (SECBE) , a non-profit educational center dedicated to helping inner-city youth understand science and math through hands-on creations, to identify neighborhood teenagers who would be interested in this project. Twenty-four "at-risk" students were selected to design and build a skate area in Riverside Park. The teens did not know each other -- the goal of the project was to foster teamwork and demonstrate practical applications of math and science. SECBE taught the students the basics of construction and took them on a weekend retreat as part of a training program in teamwork and conflict resolution. "After the retreat," said Andy Kessler, "the kids all worked together." He added, "Many had waited a long time for something like this, including me.

The teenagers were paid $80 a week to work on the project, but they didn't waste any time. Collaborating with their teachers and 2 engineers, the students first surveyed the space and built scale models of their skate park. Then they selected a few favorites which were made into balsa wood and cardboard mock-ups. "It was then that their faces really lit up," McKinney recalls, "they could imagine the real thing and see themselves skating on something that they built." The entire project was completed in five weeks.

Funding

The total cost for the Riverside Skate Park was $130,000. Most of this money came from two $50,000 grants: from the National Park Service Innovations in Recreation Program and from the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation. Other contributors included The Riverside Park Fund and The City Parks Foundation. Private construction companies donated materials to the project.

Users of the skate park pay $3 per visit which pays for Kessler's salary and maintenance. They can also sign up to be monitors, in which case they receive a free annual membership. This year Kessler hopes to attract corporate sponsors to defray costs of additional equipment and lessons.

Impacts

Although the skate park officially opened in August, 1996, construction may never be complete -- the skaters come up with new ideas and are "building as we go along," according to one of the students. Currently, a 28 ft. long, 10 ft. high half-pipe, a U-shaped structure perfectly shaped for skating, gliding and jumping down one curve and up the other, is the most popular feature for the skaters. In addition, there are three quarter-pipes, a launching ramp, benches and picnic tables. Plans for a "fun box" (a multi-faceted quarter pipe with ramps and a railing around the top) are now underway.

On a typical weekday afternoon an average of 50 skateboarders, bikers and in-line skaters use the skate park. Weekends are much busier, when over 100 enthusiasts of all levels, ranging in age from 9-30, come to the skate park from all over the metropolitan area. Skaters say they try to come about three times a week, and stay between one and five hours.

Kessler works at the park every day, ensuring that safety guidelines are followed. When skaters come to the park for the first time, they must sign a form waiving the participant's right to maintain a lawsuit against the Department of Parks. Participants under the age of 18 must have their form signed by parent or guardian. Once they have submitted a signed copy, participants need only to sign in at subsequent visits. Helmets, knee pads and elbow pads are required.

But it's not just the skaters who make the park a destination. Parents come to watch, senior citizens come to sit on the bench and enjoy, stating "it's something different -- it's not like watching the same old game of catch."

Case Study Aspect

Society today finds that hanging out in public spaces is not specific to teens of particular ethnicities, but is common to teenagers in general. On one hand middle and upper income teens should have more options for places to get together with their friends such as cars, private spaces of their own and larger homes, but demographics still show congrigating teenagers in public spaces. Also, even though the numbers of teenagers was low in proportion to the other residents of the housing developments studied, they were the most visible because they used places at times when others were not present. The role of public spaces, generally, is changing from previous decades. No longer are they settings for spontaneous social meetings. These activities now occur at coffee shops, supermarkets, and health clubs. Public spaces are instead designed to support specific activities such as transportation, specific recreation, etc. Teenagers, however, still want to and need to use public spaces as social gathering places, a place where freedom of choice is natural and not constrained by the flood of problems, choices, or stresses that arise at that point in peoples lives.

The success of the skate park is growing, making Riverside Skate Park the flagship park for a city-wide program in which city schools can take part. Park officials in neighboring Brooklyn, inspired by Riverside's success, already have identified one possible site and plan for another, teen-designed skateboard park.

Those involved in the project indicated that the process of imagining, designing and building the skate park was just as important as the final product. The skate park has tapped into the ideas and skills of teenagers, developing ways to channel their energy constructively instead of treating them as problems or victims.

The way society in the world today applies design towards adolescents becomes programmatic and casually applied to multiple situations. It’s seen as a simple equation that can be laid out for every kind of space needed. The beauty of the design and creation of Riverside Park in New York is its formation is done by the users, they have the ability to specifically gear for what they want and what they will use. In design today we see the design of spaces and environments enforcing the ideas of rejecting adolescent gathering and activity. Now we see an emergence of an entire riverside park dedicated entirely towards adolescent use, and because of its success socially and culturally it has become a success in portraying the ideal final product of its unique design.

Comparison Site

As we begin to compare the Riverside Park in New York with other intercity skate parks we see a great similarity towards the local Fargo skate park within Island Park. Both divulge on a program that’s geared towards youth in the area, mainly skaters, while still being a success by integrating into the local context, population, and vegetative park. In terms of construction, these two look like carbon copies, both edge on an already existing green city park, both fall along the edge of a dominant river structure, and both are relatively modern constructs that deal with young adolescents and their activities of inline/skateboarding. In terms of ideology the same design of space has been created in Fargo just not to the extent of the Riverside Park in NY. It remains a designed space with intent to encourage adolescent youth activity with principles geared for one particular group of the local population. Furthermore, you see a specific use of spaces that demographically reflect as a success because of the specialty of what has been done within the skate park.

As analysis continues we begin to see and enormous difference between the two in terms of amount of success and why. The biggest difference between these contextually identical sites is in the integration of the city into the New York skate park and the rather isolation of the Fargo park. For one the NY site has a better relation to the park that surrounds it, rather than be set along the far edge it’s been placed in a valuable piece of land especially in New York and because of that we see a greater appreciation of the park by the teens that use it. On average the NY park sees some 50 skaters at a given time where Fargo as maybe 50 skaters some by in a day. Because of this there’s more appreciation of the skate park by the youth that use it because not only is it a space specifically made for them, but it’s a nice and beautiful space designed for them rather than a solid cement square on the Fargo edge of a green park, with no trees, surrounded by parking lots and buildings and pressed against an existing dike.

Further reading Owens, Patsy Eubanks. "No Teens Allowed: The Exclusion of Adolescents from Public Spaces." Landscape Journal 21.1 (2002): 156-63.