For a city as rich in skateboarding culture as San Francisco, there are shockingly few places to actually skate.
Not counting a converted parking lot in nearby Daly City, only a few officially sanctioned skate parks exist in all of San Francisco, and moves to make permanent a temporary installation at the eastern end of Golden Gate Park have been met with opposition from neighborhood groups.
In 2007, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution calling for the construction of a skate park in Golden Gate Park. The Recreation and Parks Department settled on a location on the edge of the park, an empty lot at the end of Waller Street, but has only allowed the park on a trial basis with portable ramps being trucked in and out every Friday afternoon.
The temporary park is being funded by an $80,000 city grant cobbled together from a number of capital projects that unexpectedly came in under budget in 2008.
There was initially a move to install the park near the intersection of Stanyan and Fulton streets; however, that site was eventually rejected as unsuitable.
Area resident Karen Crommie is concerned that making the skate park permanent would further attract a disruptive element to the neighborhood. "Where Haight meets Stanyan, the location of the skate park, is a place where a lot of druggies hang out," Crommie told the San Francisco Examiner. "It seems so inadvisable to bring young people into the area."
Many in the skateboarding community shrug off those concerns, saying that borders need to ride somewhere. "It's the chicken-and-the-egg thing," San Francisco Skateboarding Association President Bryan Hornebeck told the San Francisco Examiner. "You gave us no place to skate, but we've got to skate somewhere, and you're pissed off if it's in your front yard."
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Skateboarding is popular in the city, yet illegal nearly everywhere other than neighborhood sidewalks. City law prohibits skateboarding on any city street and any sidewalk in any business district.
The cul-de-sac is also used for the weekly Haight Farmers Market but sits largely unused for most of the year.
While the influential Haight Ashbury Improvement Association has officially remained neutral on the project--although the organization's president, Ted Lowenberg (who also chaired the city's Skateboard Task Force) is a vocal supporter--its Cole Valley corollary has taken the lead in opposing it. The Cole Valley Improvement Association has circulated a petition urging the city to remove the park citing its ultimate price tag of $2 million and fears of a degraded quality of life in the neighborhood.
"This neighborhood is already a magnet for homeless, vagabonds, and drug dealers," said the petition, "and we can expect that these quality of life issues will only get worse, not better."
Kent Uyehara, owner of the Haight Street skate shop FTC, shrugged off these concerns, calling them unfounded due to the San Francisco Police Department station located just on the other side of Stanyan from the skate park. "If you can't have a skate park next to a police station, then basically you are saying you can't have it," Uyehara told the San Francisco Bay Guardian last year. "Skateboarders self-police their own areas...We're trying to make the neighborhood attractive for everyone, whether they're buying something or not."
Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who has spearheaded the project since its inception, argues that one of the best reasons for the city to construct more skate parks is financial--to cut down on the not insubstantial amount of damage skaters regularly do to city property. "It would address the mounting damage to public property by skaters," Mirkarimi told SF Weekly. "That's an incentive to keep it on the table."
The city expects to make its final decision whether to make the park permanent next March.
The Recreation and Parks Department is also in talks to construct a skate park in western SoMa near the soon-to-be-renovated McCoppin Hub.