Thursday March 9, 2000 by Miki Vuckovich
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"The Claremont Teen Center provided a location and an organization to manage the proposed park, but the city council still had to hold formal hearings before it could approve the project. "The reality is that on a citywide basis, in everything we do, someone�s gonna stand up and yell, �Don�t do that,�" says Guthrie. The night that the City Council was to vote on the skatepark, opponents came to speak against the idea. "It turns out that they are primarily the same nay-sayers who complain about everything that we do. It was the typical, �What�s the liability? What about the noise? All these guys are hoodlums.� The whole bit."The last to speak at those hearings was TSC member David Goldman. "When David got up and spoke, he just walked up to the mic and laid them all down," says Guthrie. "He opened his mouth and the council melted because they were supporting it anyway, and to have a young person stand up and say, �We need this. Don�t treat us any differently than you would treat anybody else,� just clinched it.
"The skaters of Claremont also had the law on their side. Last year the California State Assembly passed AB1296, a law that limits the liability a city assumes in building a skateboard park. That law was a result of lobbying efforts by the International Association of Skateboard Companies and the tens of thousands of skaters who wrote letters to their representatives at the State Capitol. Guthrie points to another trend that favors the idea of public skateparks: "There�s a movement in cities now across the country to stop, call a time out, and do a full plan about what we ought to be doing for kids and for families. We happened to be at the early part of that curve. The message is that you can�t do this stuff unless you have young people involved in the decision-making process."With the park approved, the skaters still had to raise 125,000 dollars to build it. Skateboard Committee member Matt Kramer wrote 350 letters to companies and individuals to solicit donations, and included a letter of support from the mayor, police chief, and other community leaders. "It was to say, �Please pay attention to this request, it�s very serious. The Claremont Community Foundation is the custodian of the fund, so people can take the tax write-off,�" says Guthrie. "But of the letters, Matt�s was certainly the most compelling. It was very direct: �This is our dream, this is what we want to do, and this is how we�re gonna do it.�
"Contributions to the skatepark fund came from all members of the community, individuals, local businesses, Claremont College, and corporations like Vans, Tum Yeto, and Pepsi. The Teen Skateboard Committee raised 28,500 dollars, and the city added the rest from its own park-development fund and Los Angeles County parks-and-recreation grants.With the financing worked out, they then had to find a suitable location. "That was easy," says Guthrie. "Next to the youth activities center we had an acre and a half of land that was vacant parkland that bordered the high school, so it was a perfect location."Not all cities have the perfect location ready and waiting for a skatepark to be built on it. Guthrie cites the example of nearby Pomona, California, where the city was considering building a skatepark on land in the outskirts of town: "That�s not where the skaters are�the skaters are in downtown Pomona. So I think the real issue is location. You want [the skatepark] to be accessible to the skaters, so you need to be where the skaters are or can get to. The public, particularly older people, have this view of skateboarding as a rogue sport. They don�t understand it because they don�t really see it. So I think it�s [the skatepark] successful when it�s visible to the public, so they can begin to understand and enjoy it. "A lot of cities start off saying, �Let�s try to find the best place,� and then neighbors say, �I don�t want that in my backyard.� And if they end up with a park, they stick it out at the end of the interstate or something. You�ve got to fight through that. It�s really important that, early on, the city and the community get committed to the right place for it to be.
"For the park design, the TSC worked with skatepark designers Purkiss Rose, a skatepark development company located in Los Angeles. Based on the four-foot height restriction set by the city council, feedback from the skaters, and the allotted budget, Steve Rose developed the park design through a series of meetings and revisions with the skaters. When the skaters were happy, the City Council approved it, and the project was ready to go.There was a problem, though. Los Angeles County hadn�t released the funds it promised to Claremont, and Guthrie and the city council fought for over a year before the grant was paid in Fall 1997. "We put the sign up [on the site] in December as an act of faith, to let them [the skaters] know that this thing is gonna happen," says Guthrie. "It was a �coming soon� sign."The project went up for bid soon afterward, and as cities are required to do, the Claremont City Council awarded it to the lowest bidder. "Two days after the bid came in, the bidder called," says Guthrie. "They�d made a clerical error, and our rules are that we have to throw everything out and start over again. We had actually set a groundbreaking date for February 16, and we went ahead and had it."After two more bidding rounds, the contract was finally awarded, and construction began in June. "Between the groundbreaking in February and actual start of construction, it was a long wait," says Guthrie.Having worked so hard to see this project through, the TSC decided not to leave the most crucial stage, the actual construction, to someone who�d never seen�let alone built�a skatepark. The contractor agreed to hire TSC members to work with his construction crew, offer feedback, and help explain design elements.
"They [the construction crew] did most of the work," admits TSC member Nick Hardy. "We just did little grunt work that they didn�t want to do�move wood and dig trenches. We dug about five miles� worth of trenches."They also changed the park�s design as it was constructed. Kramer says that the builders were open to modifying the park as they went, and that they relied on the skaters� feedback and instructions during the building. "After the final blueprints, we made some changes," he says. "We caught mistakes that the construction workers made. They don�t know anything about skateparks, and we don�t know anything about construction, so we just kinda bounced off each other.""When the time came to actually start building, they basically redesigned the park," says Guthrie. "They looked at the plan all chalked out [at the site], and the first thing they found was that the pyramid was too close to the lip."Many other problems became apparent once the blueprint plan was marked out on site. "More than half of the park was in one corner, so we spread it out," says Kramer, explaining how different a park can look on paper. "The original design did not have any coping at all at the edge of the bowl," says Guthrie. "Immediately, the day that they started chalking everything out, they raised it as a major issue. And the contractor�s going, �Well that�s gonna cost 8,000 dollars.� And we�re all going, �Well this is stupid, because you�re simply gonna ruin the concrete, and the whole purpose of it is to be able to go up to the edge and grind it.� One of the reasons that we wanted them [the skaters] to work the entire project was the technical advice."The change would cost 4,000 dollars, but Guthrie says repairing the ground-up concrete in a few years would cost much more, so the city allocated the funds. "They were absolutely right," he says of the skaters� insistence on adding metal coping to the park. "They knew what they were talking about. We don�t skate, so we wouldn�t have thought it through."But the park wasn�t exclusively designed for heavy-duty sessioning by Claremont�s more experienced skaters. TDC member Nik Westman says, "One of the main things we were trying to emphasize is that we had something for every skill level�a low rail, a medium rail, and a tall one. All the transitions are like that�there�s some that are practically like quarterpipes, and some that are just little hills."