If You Build It, They Will Come
Saturday afternoon we went to Conway Park to see a skate demo by local youth and to sign a petition supporting a Somerville Skate Park.
I spoke with a mom from West Somerville who was at Conway Park with her dog, a broken coated Jack Russell Terrier, appropriately named "Ollie," cheering on her three sons. Her oldest, who is a junior at Somerville High School this year, helped start the petition. Her youngest let my daughter ride his skateboard!
We spent about an hour-and-a-half at the street-hockey rink and watched kids from age five to twenty-five doing tricks on home-made ramps, platforms and rails. Though it looked like a free-for-all, with people approaching the platforms and the jumps from different directions, it was clear that an etiquette was being observed. I didn't see any collisions; Several times I watched guys approach a platform and skate away to let someone else do a stunt.
It is clear that there is a need for a skate park in Somerville. I don't think that there is any other recreational activity (with the exception of off-leash recreation, of course) that five-year-olds can enjoy with twenty-five-year-olds. They can't play basket ball together, they can't play soccer together, they can't play street hockey together, but at Conway Park on Saturday afternoon, they were playing together, learning how to do amazing things with their bodies and learning the rules of the street (if not the rules of the road).
One suggestion I have for building support for a skate park more broadly in the community: helmets. When I bring my daughter to see the "big kids" who fascinate her, I'd prefer her to see her role models wearing helmets!
The skate demo (also billed as the the somer session) was sponsored by Save Our Somerville.
