Wed 20 Jun 2007
Long time Houston skaters Barry Blumenthal and Jason Espeseth have succeeded in rounding up the last of the private donations needed to build the city’s gargantuan downtown concrete public skatepark. They’ve accomplished what no other skatepark advocacy group on Earth has achieved to date… $2 million in donations raised without any public funds going to build the facility. The city donated $4 million in land, but no money for construction.
To put this in perspective, the Black Pearl Skatepark (private, pay-for-play) cost $2 million. Here’s the design created by Grindline. Here’s a story in the Houston Chronicle talking about the skatepark fundraising success.
June 21st, 2007 at 3:07 pm
what ever happened to the Skatepark of Houston off 45 (or was it 59?) and aldine-bender orange grove or something like that.
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:17 am
i hope grindline sticks with the design, the corpus street section became a bowl. that would suck to see the houston design be changed.
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:51 pm
has grindline EVER stuck with a design? I havent seen it if they have
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:43 pm
I wish someone besides Grindline would build a park ’round here. Wish they’d give Wally 2 mill.
June 26th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
i heard that ideal is doing one in round rock.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
The large flow bowl is going to be changed…for the better. I hope to get an updated design soon.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:40 am
grindline sux…. hopefully they will drink too much pbr and pass out.
June 27th, 2007 at 11:27 am
1. welcome to this century.
2. and 3. Have you seen San Marcos?
4. Wally doesn’t building parks just design, and they all are variations of the same elements kinda like Perry Homes. What you want a big hubba, a craddle, this size deep end some steps, etc. lets plug it into the old computer and spit it out.
June 27th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Grindline sux?
How many parks have you visited? These guys lay down excellent skate terrain albeit tranny oriented and burly.
I have heard so many opinions about what a skatepark is supposed to be it seems like no company could please everyone. For me seeing another perfect set of stairs and rails being called a skatepark sucks but that is just one opinion.
June 28th, 2007 at 2:08 am
Grindline sux?
How many parks have you visited?
…all the crappy ones they built at mabel, lakeway and roundrock. still payin to skate at spa…
June 28th, 2007 at 8:20 am
yeah i mean, the street terrain has been under represented by the grindline projects…
June 28th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Grindline doesn’t totally suck they are just good at one thing. Big bowls with steep tranny.
BTW “go skateboarding day” gone wrong:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2007/280607skateboarder.htm
June 28th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Maybe a computer could have told grindline not to design a handrail going into a fence…or a bowl with so much flat you have to tack on a pump bump later as a fix.
Computer designs are good! http://www.skatedesign.com/index.html
June 29th, 2007 at 3:34 am
i couldn’t have said it better myself houstonwehaveaskatepark. that pump bump is a joke. that whole rr thing is a fiasco. what a bunch of money down the drain. it’s been closed for a long time so they can build tacos nobody can skate, could stay closed for all i care. houston, fire grindline now before it’s too late. heard they have a great skatepark in irving now…grindline must not have been involved.
June 29th, 2007 at 11:41 am
If the Round Rock park is so bad it should just stay closed then why does everyone I have talked to Love to skate it? Sounds like if you don’t get the design you want you just complain. I guess the Bainbridge Island, Orcas Island, Milton, Summner, Arlington, Corpus, and many others are all real pieces of crap too and all the skaters that travel to and skate those don’t know what they are doing. I foolishly like skating at Mabel Davis which proves I am stupid for enjoying my local skatepark instead of wishing it was something else.
June 29th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Agreed Jack. Crappy is as crappy does. Talk shit under a real name.
June 29th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
o.k….. brete.
June 30th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
ha ha crappyattitude. you are funny. i would love to ride with you. 512 736 8729. watch and learn
June 30th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Crappy,
I’ll give it to you that Lakeway isn’t such a fun park for me. Mabel Davis and Round Rock, though? Everytime I go to Mabel Davis, I end up skating until fatigue or darkness ends the session. It’s 10 times better than anything I had available to skate when I was a teenager. It’s been open a year now and the street section is still packed day-after-day. The bowl would probably be more accessible if it had mellower transitions, but it is still the funnest concrete bowl within four hours.
Unless you count Round Rock. That bowl is super fun. Pool coping. A cradle. Lovseat. Birdbath. The only thing that would have made it better would have been a deathbox… ha-hah! Seriously, too much flatbottom? Try skating the mythical Burnside. Nobody hates on Burnside, but it’s got more flat than Paris Hilton uses the word, “I”.
In the Houston design, I would like to see more open street terrain. Hopefully, street skaters in the home of the Fifth Ward will get more involved in the process and campaign for their own interests.
Seth
June 30th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
seth, this guy obviously doesn’t ride his board, he stands on top of it. some people are just complainers. i bet that if he surrounded himself with positive people, his out look would change. imagine traveling with this homo
July 6th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
who built the cement park in Allen TX ? i loved that place. wish it was in austin.
July 7th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
it seems that all grindline parks are all computer cut and paste design. they all have a generic feel and no soul. fun yes but tries to pls everyone. why not make a 7ft backyard kidney with loveseat and stairs? or recreate the pflugerville ditch from the 80s? you can still have huge 12′ slabs of speed just spice it up with some creativity. maybe a nod to local tradition..houson=LARGE METAL RAMPS & mickey mouse bowls…
July 8th, 2007 at 2:44 am
Fireskill,
Allen was built by California Skateparks. The leader on the build was Eric Dawkins, who is an excellent builder.
The design of Allen’s bowls really is lacking to me. Instead of waterfalls for different depths, they have extensions. The coping is really small and tends to have you flying up on the decks when grinding.
In the street area, the hubbas are super tall and lack sufficient run-up.
None of these problems are due to Eric’s workmanship, however. The concrete work is great. Obviously the shortcomings I’ve listed aren’t that big of a deal. The park is crowded as crap everyday.
LES- do some research and you’ll find your comments are wildly uneducated.
Seth
July 8th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Seth
“do reseach” is a bit of a cop out. so give an example or a link. looking at the grindline website is like looking at the starbucks menu. it’s everywhere with a very distinct style. grindline is close to a monopoly and good for them. but i would like to see another player in the skatepark bidness with little more soul in the design area. grindline uses the same wide open elements in ALL of their parks just put together in differing layouts. the “street” areas are so played. stairs and a ledge wow…throw some planters in with trees (shade would be nice) or a wierd gap line..do something new, through some color into the grey landscape. a skate park is urban archetechture in a park setting and should be treated as such.
July 9th, 2007 at 1:25 am
LES-
You’re definitely on an inspired track when it comes to what would make a good skate environment. I think everyone would be in agreement that authentic elements like planters would make for a good street park.
The fact that they don’t show up in a street park doesn’t mean designers like Grindline’s Micah is clueless. He’s a super-talented designer. A public skate facility is a compromise of multiple dimensions: Budget, site elevations/soil composition, and street vs tranny demands by the locals. To put a tree in a planter, you can’t plant a sapling or it’ll get trampled and broken. If you install a large tree, you’re looking at like $5000 for the tree, and then you’ve got to consider some kind of in-ground irrigation system to keep it alive. In a normal $100k-$250k budget, you’re focusing a pretty significant portion of the budget on stuff that can’t be skated on. You’ll have to reduce square footage of concrete that can be ridden on to provide unskateable aesthetics. So in the sub-$400k examples you’ll find on Grindline’s site, they’ve chosen to maximize skateable terrain. In the Houston scenario, $2 million should allow for some of what you’re suggesting, like what New Line was able to accomplish in Winnipeg on a similar budget. My guess is that the Houston design has been driven by the skateboarders who did all the work to raise money and campaign to get the park built. I would like to see more of a Winnipeg facility go into downtown Houston, and this thing is still way early in the process, so we’ll have to just wait and see.
Considering that you are posting from NYC about cookie-cutter Grindline bowls suggests to me that you haven’t skated many of them- that’s why I recommended the research. Relative to the other significant builders, Grindline’s bowls are far from repetitious. Site Design is the king of cookie-cutter. Their transitions are always the same, and frequently the same exact design will be sold to multiple cities. If you want a backyard pool replica by Grindline, visit Lakeway and suffer the perpetual figure-8 peanut.
http://www.austinpublicskatepark.org/skatepark_gallery/v/Lakeway_Texas_Skatepark/grand_opening/Lakeway+Public+Skatepark+-+14.jpg.html
Instead, I’d recommend you skate Amarillo’s fullpipe-cone-to-cradle, then drive a couple hours to Trinidad’s snake-run bowl. Those two parks share nothing in common and are my favorite roadtrip destinations.
Thanks for the discussion. Five years ago when you brought up the topic of public skateparks, people would just say that it’ll never get built in ‘this’ town. It’s refreshing that people are beyond that pessimism and now debating on how they should be built.
Seth
July 9th, 2007 at 9:28 am
The local grindline bowls have similar elements but to say that Mable Davis, Round Rock and Lakeway came from the same cookie cutter, you just haven’t skated them then.
July 10th, 2007 at 12:41 am
I was fortunate enough to hit both Etnies (Site Design Group) and Costa Mesa (Purkiss Rose)in socal this spring and each was very nice, albeit a little mellow. The Etnies street course is the best I have seen so far 100+ yards of mini bowls, manual pads, stairs, rails, flat…..They were not built by Grindline but really allowed me a better understanding of what is out there/possible from both a design and finish-out perspective. I also had the opportunity to hit Bainbridge and Milton in WA. state last summer and they were Grindline and just amazing from top to bottom. I did frequently skate the original Carlsbad, Del Mar, Upland, Whittier, Big O and others. From my perspective Grindline parks are excellent, great trannies, clever designs, challenging, little to no kinks, good set up walls for speed and tricks. I really think every design leaves more to be desired and street and mini bowls are under-represented in the Austin parks so far. But to say it is because Grindline is a bad designer or builder is really pretty silly. If you re-read Seth’s last post about the volunteer efforts and the desires/lobbying of those involved in the projects as well as the realities of site and budget limitations and then skate different parks, it might open your mind some.
July 12th, 2007 at 11:08 am
“…street and mini bowls are under-represented in the Austin parks so far.”
I wouldn’t say street is under-represented in Austin. 2 of the 3 area parks have more street sq/ft than tranny. And Lakeway would have had more street as well if the original design had been followed. We’re definitely lacking in minibowls though.
July 12th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
What is a “minibowl”?
July 13th, 2007 at 12:33 am
I think they should all be pools and bowls, but from a usage perspective there is more of culture/demand for street over vert. The minis seem like a waste of space but they are the bridge for kids that helps them evolve to the bigger stuff.
July 13th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
A minibowl or mini halfpipe is traditionally a 4′ to 6′ deep bowl (or bowl section) with trannies in the 6′-8′ range (which means “no vert”). The little bowl at the Skatepark of Austin is a “minibowl”. The 6′ section of the 69 bowl is also.
Mini halfpipes (known as miniramps or simply “minis”) were all the rage back in the late 80’s-early 90’s, even among vert pros (remember the old Tom Petty video Free Falling with Gator?). I personally love ‘em and think every park should have them. Great fun for both beginners and pros alike.
http://www.skateparkofaustin.com/content.cfm?cid=56
July 13th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
minibowls are fun.
July 13th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
Ah. So in reality ALL the skateparks in the Austin area have “minibowls”.
July 14th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Actually, none of the Austin parks have minibowls, at least not in the traditional sense. A single non-vert 4′-6′ wall doesn’t constitute a minibowl.
All of Mabel goes to vert…even the shallow. Plus there’s no directly opposing walls of equal height in the 4′-6′ range that can be sessioned separately.
RR has no opposing walls in the 4′-6′ range that can be sessioned as a traditional minibowl/halfpipe.
Lakeway has sort of a minibowl area, but not really. One wall has a foot of vert and another wall is the backside of a much-taller ledge.
A perfect example of a minibowl section is the recently-built Grindline bowl in Kettle Falls, WA. It wonderfully incorporates a traditional minibowl with big vert and a cradle. It covers many tranny elements extremely well, IMHO.
http://www.northwestskater.com/kettlefalls.html
http://www.concretedisciples.com/skateparksdb/skateparks_display.php?id=3521
July 14th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
i am sorry i didn’t know that i had touched the third rail of ASN “thou shalt not diss grindline”. ment no offense just wanted to talk design. yes it is an amazing evolution in the skate community that we are now sccessfully navigating the stupifingly boring city government bond process and getting these parks built. i realize that anything built with public funds is a comprimise, i am hoping that skaters will demand more from the city and the vendor then a fenced in rad concrete hole in the ground. maybe tart it up with some tile or a bench with shade … our goal is the same i just don’t like to spend my money only at starbucks. i think its funny that you felt the need to call me out about posting from NYC like texans don’t ever move from the motherland. but yes i haven’t skated amarillo (nice nod to the texas pipes) but i have skated seattle,austin and soon stamford among others. and if i ever move back to austin i will be slugging it out in the statehouse and city council to get more spots and rights for the skate community – keep up the good work seth – peace
July 24th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
You know I was gonna go into a big rant about all the bitching and “minibowl” definition bullshit but why bother.?.?.? Either yur gonna skate this stuff or your not. Who cares. I hope more people hate than like it. Less crowds.
Ryan