First Look: LaFayette Park Skateland
March 18, 2009 at 12:08 pm in Sports
From my perspective, LaFayette Park, bordered by Wishire Boulevard to the south and Commonwealth to the west is famous for two things — no, three: 1) The 2-on-2 tournament from “White Men Can’t Jump” was filmed on its basketball courts; 2) The south side of the adjoining Felipe de Neve branch of the LA Public Library (a former substation for the IAAL•MAF) is fenced off and inaccessible from the park itself; 3) It never really took a whole lot of rain to turn the inadequately drained, below-street-level southwest corner of the place into a lake often left standing and stagnant for days on end.
Which obviously makes that section the perfect place for the City of Los Angeles Dept. of Recreation and Parks to put a skatepark that I biked by this morning and snapped through the bars of the locked gates that didn’t prevent several truant shenanigonians from enjoying the as-yet-completed zone officially dubbed by those kooky-krazee city types as DESIGNATED SKATE PARK (click the image to biggify and familiarize yourself with the inevitable rules before the sign gets tagged all to hell).
Though this design seems a little lacking in skate amenities — especially when compared to the Culver City Skate Park on Jefferson Boulevard that opened in 2007, which in turn gets totally blown out by the under-construction 16,000-square-foot Venice Sk8travaganza — the fact is I’m just old and jealous. Back in the day when I bombed the hills of Hollywood and with every issue of Skateboarder magazine further mythologized the likes of the sport’s pioneers carving up the copings all over the mythological realm of Dogtown, if I wanted to get me some official skatepark action I had to truck myself out to Reseda or West Covina and pay for the privilege.
We’ve definitely come a long way, baby. But we’ve got a ways to go if “Designated Skate Park” is the best name the city could drop.
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