Skate Park on the Fence

By Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writer

Jan. 6 -- After clearing all the hurdles in its path, Memorial Park’s long-awaited 24,000-square-foot skate park hit a kink Monday night at the Architectural Review Board, which remained on the fence over its chain-link enclosure.

Mostly content with the rolling concrete and metal layout, board members worried that the proposed fence made the park feel like a “prison” and obstructed the view of spectators. They voted to send the project -- which has been nine years in the making -- back for revision.

The proposed eight-foot-high fence encircling the street-concrete playground, which includes 8,500-cubic inches of curvaceous, multiple-pool “vert” (skate slang for vertical), posed both aesthetic and safety concerns.

Board member Iris Oliveras wondered: “Won't kids impale themselves” on the fence’s exposed spiked top? Another board member worried that the fence’s height would fail to guard unsuspecting children playing nearby from flying skateboards.

“I certainly hope not,” Brett Horner, senior analyst for the City’s community and cultural services, said of both scenarios. “Unless the skateboard can do it on its own,” Horner said, an eight-foor fence should do the trick.

Comparing it to a skate park he saw in Boulder, Colorado, board member Rodolfo Alvarez said he was generally “disappointed” with the project and saw the fence as a shortcoming.

“It’s like going to a theatre and having so many columns in front of you that you can’t see the performance,” said Alvarez.

Compared to the more “sophisticated” and “advanced” Boulder park, where “they really integrated the fan, the observers, the mother, the father, and other skaters into the skater area -- here it seems you’re blocking them out.”

The fence is just one reason the design fails to ascend to a “national grandeur” compatible with his vision of Santa Monica, Alvarez said.

With its “disappointing” size and scope, the park will fail to be a magnet for tourists and national and international skateboarding competitions that would pump money in the local economy and put another jewel on the City’s crown.

“If you were going to have a competition, which would bring money into the city, you would have it in Boulder, not in Santa Monica,” Alvarez said.

“Precisely because Santa Monica is where it all started, I am disappointed,” Alvarez said, referring to theDogtown skate team revered as the founding fathers of modern skateboarding, having perfected the craft on the streets and in the empty pools of Santa Monica and Venice Beach 30 years ago.

However, the designers of the park maintained that while the project was limited by space and money – a much larger space at the beach was shot down – it stays true to the legacy left behind by the living legends and boasts all the features needed for professional competitions.

The park, designers said, sports especially designed “ShotCrete” concrete surfaces that are as “smooth as butter” paving three separate and adjoining pools or “combie-bowls” varying in depth from 4 to 11 feet. The pools are encircled by galvanized metal coping on the lips, connecting to metal and concrete handrails, stairs and other street elements.

“It’ll meet the needs of the old-school and new-school skaters,” said John Little, who is on the California Skateparks design team.

Some board members disagreed with Alvarez’s criticisms.

Oliveras pointed out that the park was “designed on a small scale” and was never meant to aspire to national grandeur.

While the park is not dug as deep into the ground as the one at Boulder, where observers can safely peer down at the spectacle, it provides a direct eye-level “3-D perspective” of the acrobatic goings on, Oliveras said.