Anticipation Mounts As Skate Park Nears Completion

It’s an unusually warm spring night for Potrero skaters and with decisions mounting as to where to skate – the usual skate park too old fashioned and crowded with junkies - they turn to the unfinished Potrero Del Sol Park as a haven to release their inner skate demons.

“That park right there is fun as hell,” Chris Dunn says, a 32-year-old skater and employee of Mission Skateboards on 24th and Treat streets in San Francisco. Dunn is a regular at the nearly finished Potrero Del Sol Skate Park. “There’s been cops that came through the park to keep the skaters out,” he says. “They put up a chain link fence.”

There isn’t much choice for skateboarders in San Francisco when it comes to choosing which skate park they want to use to test their tricks. “There’s like two parks,” says Dunn. The Crocker-Amazon skate park off Geneva Ave. is currently the only other skate park that can match Potrero Del Sol Park’s size, but the 24-year-seasoned skater says of the incomplete park, “I don’t want to skate anything but that park.”

“The skate parks here are fucking pathetic,” scoffs Ryan Carruthers, a 32-year-old skater from Portland, Oregon who was part of a six-member crew who designed and built the Potrero Del Sol skate park. “There are more skaters here than any other city,” he says. “There’s an incredibly low amount of skate parks here,” fueling the outcry and consensus of skaters in San Francisco about the city’s lack of generosity for its skateboarding community.

Nestled against Potrero Hill off Potrero Ave. and 25th street in San Francisco lay Potrero Del Sol Park. According to a 2005 SF Chronicle article by Carolyn Jones, Potrero Del Sol Park was budgeted with a $720,559 grant from the state parks department to build a playground and skate park as well as new landscaping in the 4.5-acre space.

Planning for the park began on October 1, 2002. An official project status report released on April 1, 2008 from the Department of Recreation and Park revealed that 85 percent of construction was complete with a park opening date scheduled for June 1, 2008.

“Everything goes twice as slow here than in the warehouse,” Carruthers says of his experience with the construction delays.

“I feel it’s great that we have a skate park even if it’s a year from now,” Alexsis Beach, a nearby resident and mother of an 11-year-old skater who frequents the fenced off skate park says citing that the Crocker-Amazon skate park is “lousy” and “full of junkies.”

To try and combat undesirable activity inside and outside Potrero Del Sol Park, security guards have been hired by the city. “Safety is number one,” Sing Vs, a night security guard for AMBI Protective Services says.

But already on the ground outside and inside the chain-linked wall surrounding Potrero Del Sol Park are cigarette butts, broken bottles, and used condoms.