Before, Jimenez says, the park’s backwards appeal was in its grit. It also raised the park’s profile, drawing skateboarders from beyond the city and even outside Connecticut on the weekends. The fact that the city responded to what the skaters wanted, Berkowitz says, created an important sense of ownership. The parks department eventually led the planning and construction process and came up with $140,000 in city funds to pay for it. In addition to providing the shade tent and paint, the group also built a funbox, which Jimenez says helped show the city how a little upgrade could go a long way. In his professional life, Jimenez serves as communications and arts coordinator at the WVRA, which spearheaded local fundraising for the skate park and organized community support from skaters and non-skaters alike. It starts with a round of Rock Paper Scissors to determine who goes first-the inspiration for the art Berkowitz and Jimenez have painted on one of the park’s older ramps. Much like HORSE in basketball, SKATE requires players to follow and land one another’s tricks or earn a letter for missing them. “The only competitive thing that happens here on a daily basis is the game of SKATE,” Berkowitz says. “I don’t think you’ll ever find a mean person,” Neris says. Once in a while, someone attempts a trick that gets a shout-out or a laugh or a teasing cry of “you stole my trick!” But everyone I talk to describes the skaters here as a community. “Determination” is the word skater Jonathan Neris uses to describe it. A few are wearing ear buds, but most seem sunk in their own thoughts. The park is surprisingly quiet for the number of skaters on this summer evening, almost all of them men and boys. “It’s become a home for people.” That love spills over into the rest of the park, Berkowitz adds, pointing out people walking their dogs or biking alone past the skate park-a change from years past. “There’s a lot of younger people that are here because of the improvements and because the love the park has gotten,” Jimenez says. A four-year-old girl has impressed both Berkowitz and Jimenez with her skateboarding skills. The youngest on the evening of our conversation is maybe 10, but the age range dips even lower. A few are in their 50s, and several parents come to skate with their kids. But the bigger the skating community has grown-Jimenez uses the word “family”-the safer the park has become.īerkowitz, co-founder and CEO of SeeClickFix, who served with Jimenez on the committee that planned the upgrades, is 40 and part of an older generation of skateboarders at the park. “That was totally off-limits.” The same was true of the skate park in its early days, when Jimenez says gang members often passed through and he witnessed at least one scary fight. “In the late ’80s, early ’90s, we did not go in Edgewood Park,” says skater Ben Berkowitz, who grew up in Westville. The skate park hasn’t always been well cared for, or even safe. Other upgrades to the park include a drinking fountain for skaters donated by the Regional Water Authority, with a dog fountain below it to serve passersby on their way to the nearby dog park new trees and plantings from the Urban Resources Initiative a skate and bike repair station given by the Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees and a shade tent from the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance (WVRA), which also donated lots of paint. “David Moser Is Here” reads one wall, a tribute to the city landscape architect who worked with skaters to design the park’s extension and who died on the same day the renovated park was formally unveiled last September. Local artists and skaters have lent color and personality to the scene with their street art. The concrete addition with several new quarter pipes, ramps and ledges dips down on the far side of an old asphalt expanse that includes weird elements like a cast-off highway median. Today, an eight-foot chain link fence around the space is gone. Located on the site of an old outdoor ice rink since 2000, Edgewood Skate Park has experienced a renaissance in the past year, thanks in great part to the tenacity of local skaters who spent years pushing for improvements and funding improvised elements out-of-pocket while they bided their time. It’s about an hour before sunset, and skaters are weaving through Edgewood Skate Park, riding the ramps to set up for tricks, grinding on the edges of obstacles or simply cruising back and forth, their wheels crunching on asphalt and humming along the park’s smooth new concrete surface. “The whole place has just kind of come alive,” skateboarder Noé Jimenez says.
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