River City SkatePark: Realizing a Vision in South Park
By Valerie Schlordet
Introduction
Just off South Cloverdale Street in South Park, tucked into a corner next to an onramp to SR 99, is a mysterious structure. From the street, it looks at first glance like a prehistoric monument—or maybe an Earthship. Get closer and you’ll see that it’s a skate park structure, with concrete curves and swells lovingly adorned with graffiti. But this is no ordinary skate park structure. Known as Stargate, with portals in the four cardinal directions, it was designed to evoke flow and transcendence, the completely-in-the-moment state that skaters experience. A kind of homage to the Zen of skateboarding, it sits at the heart of the 4,000-square-foot River City SkatePark.
“It’s all based on sacred geometry,” says Kim Schwarzkopf, co-leader of the River City SkatePark project. “It sounds a little out there, but it’s very meaningful because it’s the vision of Mark ‘Monk’ Hubbard.”
Hubbard, a legendary skater and founder of Seattle-based skatepark design firm Grindline, died in 2018, but his beloved presence is still felt in the skating community, and Schwarzkopf still speaks of him in the present tense. “He’s built skateparks all over the world, but this is where he could realize his vision as a skateboarder and as a skatepark designer/artist, and as a local,” she says. When pro skaters come to Seattle, Stargate is at the top of their list.”
A Community Effort
Fifteen years ago, when a group of South Park teenagers were seeking a safe, legal place to skate, caring neighbors put the word out and Hubbard volunteered to design the park and ensure it was built. Schwarzkopf, who was becoming involved in skatepark advocacy throughout the city, heard about the teens’ project through mutual friends and immediately fell in love with the idea.
The nonprofit Sea Mar Community Health Centers offered a site for the skate park—an overgrown piece of land that was often used for illegal dumping.
When Schwarzkopf got involved, she says, “I thought it would just be about collecting signatures and passing out some stickers.”
From the outset, the skatepark has been maintained by a group of volunteers, the Friends of River City SkatePark, who do everything from pick up trash to whack weeds. “We’ve been working on this park for 15 years,” says Schwarzkopf. “But it’s been in the last three or four years that we’ve had renewed energy and an increased push to make it a more welcoming and inclusive park for South Park neighbors and kids and families.” With contributions from skaters, parents, neighbors, local businesses and the hard work of Jake Hellenkamp from Seattle Neighborhood Group, the effort has taken on new life. That renewed energy has led to the construction of a flat, open skate plaza for younger and novice skaters, an art wall, and a rain garden built by members of Duwamish Infrastructure Restoration Training (DIRT) Corps. Improvements also include better sightlines from the street into the park. These upgrades were celebrated in August with an end-of-summer launch party to activate the space. A local band, The Fakies, played in the middle of Stargate, and organized activities included skating trick competitions and timed trials with categories for kids, women, and trans people—even a masters’ division for so-called “old-timers” (that is, skaters over 30).
Friends of River City SkatePark are pushing forward with additional improvement plans, writing grants and networking with city departments and community organizations. The plans include extending the skate plaza, improving lighting in the park, building a roof canopy for all-weather skating, and replacing the chain-link fence around the park, which is in a state of disrepair, with a sturdier architectural fence that will help define the space and purpose of the park.
Like young skaters, the park needs some nurturing to realize its full potential. It also needs to be safe and accessible to better serve its urban community. The vision is for a place that both embodies creative skater culture and welcomes all ages and abilities. That would be, Schwarzkopf says, “really in the original spirit of what Monk and the rest of us want to do with this place.”
