By this time next year, work may be underway to give skateboarders in Boston a new place to do ollies and kickflips.
Plans for a skatepark located on the banks of the Charles River may be put in concrete in March 2013, when the Charles River Conservancy said construction is scheduled to start.
“We’re definitely excited for it,” said Armin Bachman, the owner of Orchard Skateshop in Allston. “It’s been a long time coming and still a long ways off.”
The Charles River Conservancy, in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, has been informally planning for the park since the 1990s, said Renata von Tscharner, president of the Charles River Conservancy, in an email to The Daily Free Press.
But if everything goes as planned, she said, skaters will be able to use the park by December of 2013.
The skatepark will be built “underneath the ramps of the Zakim Bridge in East Cambridge,” adjacent to a bend in the river’s northern bank, according to the Conservancy’s website.
The Massachusetts Department of Transportation is donating the plot of land to the Conservancy.
The project has been plagued by stagnant funds and planning for years, but “currently the DCR, in partnership with MassDOT, who will transfer the land to DCR, is working on a Memorandum of Understanding with the Conservancy,” von Tscharner said.
The memorandum will model itself after an older agreement that the Conservancy made with the DCR, when the DCR allowed private contractors to build the Esplanade Playscape on their land and then donated the park to the Conservancy, she said.
“The original plan had always been for the Conservancy to build the skatepark,” von Tscharner said. “But at the end of 2008 when DCR’s funding continued to decline, the state looked at ways that they might find capital funds to build the park themselves and use the funds raised by the Conservancy to maintain it.”
The Conservancy raised the funds – about $2.5 million – between 2004 and 2008, and the DCR will pay for the park’s ongoing maintenance.
The park itself was designed by “nationally recognized skatepark designer Zach Wormhoudt,” and will be built by Grindline, according to the Charles River Skatepark website.
The “design evolved over several years with the input of some 400 skaters,” according to the Conservancy’s website, and “entails about half streetscape elements and three bowls with the addition of a vertical cup.”
Planners conceived the park as a place for Boston’s youth to hone their skills at the sport, and to do so legally, off public sidewalks and railings, according to a Conservancy press release.
But many skaters said this one proposed park will not be enough, Bachman said.
Bachman said he and others at the Orchard Skateshop are “definitely excited” but are also open to smaller plans at “a fraction of the cost” that take less time to see results.
“I don’t think this one park should be the only park [local governments] plan on building,” he said. “We’re working with Brookline and Cambridge to try and get the conversation going to build other spots that don’t take 15 years to build.”
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