From Skate

Let’s get a few things out of the way first. This park is way too small to be the only park in a city the size of Providence. It is a neighborhood park trying to do the job of a regional one, plopped in an area where more kids have bikes than skateboards. I skate it regularly, but don’t even think of going there in the afternoon, even when school is in session.

Also, there is no tranny over 4′, and Sam Batterson put the whole thing together at under $18 a square foot. Cheap!

Having said that, I love skating this place in the morning, the earlier the better.

The skatepark is actually at the base of a hillside featuring 88 acres of woodland. I’ve seen deer peering down on my sessions. There’s also a lady who holds some kind of ersatz church service in the woods every morning in the summer, including playing hymns on her trumpet. The skatepark is also between a pool/water park, baseball fields (recently renovated), a playground and some well-used walking paths.

The park itself is an unusually varied small flow park with lots of kink-free lines. In a quick circuit or two you can grind metal and pool coping on round and flat wall, carve over a bench in on a steep China bank, slappy a granite curb, launch off a manhole cover or 3′ mound, hit an embedded barrel, slanted Jersey barrier or common flat rail. The park is compact and well enough laid out that you can do all that stuff in a line, if you’re got the skills.

The concrete is still pretty smooth after five years of use. The pool coping has been chipped and repaired in a few places, not repaired in others, and completely broken off (for easier flyouts presumably) in another. There’s some concrete chipping under the metal coping and on the bench. Overall the park is in pretty decent shape.

The bowl deserves a special mention. It is ridiculous. It is too small, too quick, completely ill-conceived, and I’ve been obsessed with mastering it for a year. Yes, you can do backside and frontside carve grinds in it — I have! It also sets up the best speed lines for the rest of the park. Mastering the tiny bowl is a rewarding quest.

Since branching out and finding lines in every direction across the park is so key here, it is doubly important that you get there early. Once you get over, say a half-dozen active skaters and bikers sessioning, things become very linear to keep people from plowing into each other, and then the whole thing feels pretty pedestrian.

A nice solo or two or three person session around 8:00 AM? Awesome.