Tom Long, left, and Jeff Woodbury, two of the driving forces behind the new South Portland Skatepark, are thrilled with the end result. Drew Johnson / The Forecaster
South Portland’s long-awaited skate park near the high school and community center is now open to the public.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony and other festivities will be held at the park June 21, which is also “Go Skateboarding Day” nationwide. The park is definitely worth celebrating, according to those who worked for over five years toward its completion.
“I’d argue that, right now, it is the best skate park in Maine,” said Tom Long of Portland, a skate park committee member and former owner of Long’s Board Shop in South Portland.
One reason for that is because it’s designed for skaters of all experience levels, Long said.
“There are nice flat areas (where) the beginners can get their ollies and their kick-flips under control and not feel like they’re blocking everybody up,” he said.
The 10,000-square-foot concrete skate park with a flow bowl, quarter pipes, rails and ledges also suits the needs of more advanced skaters for both street and bowl skating styles.
The design by Pillar Design Studios provides “little nooks” throughout the skate park. Most skate park designs usually lump skaters into one or two large areas and that can lead to long waits to drop in safely, Long explained. The nooks allow more skaters to use the park at one time while also reducing the risk of collisions. And it’s not just skaters that use the new park.
This drone shot shows the South Portland Skatepark’s multiple nooks that allow skaters to flow through it more freely and limit the risk of collisions. Contributed / City of South Portland
“I’ve seen skateboarders, inline skaters, bicycles, and a bunch of kids on scooters,” said Jeff Woodbury, a member of the committee.
The success of the project, Woodbury and Long said, is due to a vigilant group of stakeholders who participated in the process before, during and after the pandemic.
“We just had a fantastic group of people – the right group of people to get a park of this caliber pulled off,” Long said.
“Tom had the shop and he knew about skate park design. He was exactly the right guy to have on the committee,” said Woodbury, who started skateboarding when he was 9. “I’m just a local citizen, I’ve got two kids here in town that just graduated high school.”
Other committee members of all ages, both skaters and non-skaters, were “gung ho” about the project and their mission, Woodbury said. “We had kids, we had some fairly old people,” and the input was especially helpful when it came to narrowing down a lengthy list of possible locations.
The committee eventually selected the site across Nelson Road from the South Portland Community Center and across Mountain View Road from the high school.
“It’s visible, so it’s not going to succumb to graffiti. If somebody gets hurt, there’s help,” Woodbury said. “It can’t get better than this.”
“It’s definitely going to be one of the more heavily used parks in the city,” said Anthony Johnson, deputy director of South Portland Parks and Recreation and chairperson of the committee. Johnson, whose office is at the community center, said skaters have used the park “seven days a week, when it’s nice out” since it opened in mid-May.
The grand opening from 4 to 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 21, will feature skateboard demos and a competition, music, giveaways and a High Roller Lobster food truck.
“Some live music, some competition and some food,” Johnson said. “Hopefully we’ll get a good turnout and have a good day.”
The $512,000 skate park was funded mostly by the city, but roughly $140,000 of the cost was covered by fundraising.
“That was during the pandemic, so we did the best we could,” Johnson said. “That was through grants and we did an online campaign and some in-person fundraisers.”
“We got a lot of support from the community,” Woodbury said. “To be honest with you, this isn’t cheap. But we went the right way and spent the money on something that’s going to last a long, long time.”
The five-year effort has taken a lot of work, starting with the simple idea of having a skate park in the city to fundraising, generating designs, and finally seeing the final product.
“It’s been a long process,” Johnson said. “We’re really happy with the way it came out and to have it to this point to be able to let the public use it.”
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