Skaters for Portland Skateparks

Some pics from the Pier Park Pickup over at Antigravity Press.

Be a good neighbor and come help out for a couple of hours at the Pier Park Pickup SOLV event tomorrow from 9am - 1 pm. We’ll be doing trash pickup and graffiti coverup at the skatepark. Breakfast treats from Tulip Pastry Shop and hot coffee from Starbucks. It should be a nice morning to hang out at the park anyway.

Time for the annual SOLV Pier Park Pickup. 9:00 AM-1:00 PM, This Saturday, April 18, 2009

North Lombard St. and Bruce Ave. (From Lombard turn down Bruce Street and go to where it ends at the corner of Bruce and North James St.)

SOLV Meeting Location: Meet by the turn-around at the beginning of the disc golf course. You can also meet us at the skatepark.

Okay, I volunteered for the Pier Park skatepark cleanup again. Last year we did graffiti abatement and trash pickup around the park. It’s a four hour gig and your high-schooler can get community service credit if they need it. You can sign up at their website. Last year they had lunch for us and they need to know how many people are planning to show up.

The weather was great for the Pier Park Anniversary session ten days ago. A good turnout, t-shirt giveaway and pipe-pasting contest made for good times. Check out the coverage on Earth Patrol Media and Skate and Annoy.

Photo by Rich Burton

One day it’s just a hole in the ground and before you know it it’s walking and talking. Hard to believe isn’t it? Weather looks good this weekend. Nothing official, although we have a couple of decks and some tshirts we might be persuaded to part with. Come grind with us.

Rod Wojtanik, one of the most influential voices in Pacific Northwest skateboarding, is packing his bags for a new professional opportunity and leaving behind skatepark development. Rod recently announced his pending departure from the City of Portland’s Parks & Recreation bureau for a landscape architecture position with Metro, Portland’s regional government. He’ll begin in September.

Bureaucrats come and go in government, but Rod occupied a unique position. In addition to more traditional planning and landscape design project responsibilities, Rod oversaw development of Portland’s groundbreaking skatepark program. Portland, you probably know, has three new skate projects open to the public, two more awaiting execution, and 14 more sited and planned for development. No city on earth has done what Portland is doing, and Rod steered the system from its inception to its current status. For skateboarders, Rod’s departure marks the end of an era.

It would only be fair to acknowledge skaters’ relationship with Rod through the years has had its share of ups and downs. Advocacy requires vigilance to achieve desired goals, and sometimes that means rejecting the bureaucratic status quo. Rod didn’t always share skaters’ views or strategies, but he learned a lot about skateboarding in a hurry and always worked to see skaters get the same respect every other recreational interest group enjoys. We presented the facts, and he helped broadcast them.

Rod knows more about skateboarding and its subculture than any non-skater we know. We owe him a debt of gratitude for making the effort to translate our needs into a language the mainstream machine understands. The reality is successful advocacy is a two-way street: you can’t expect people to support your needs if you are unwilling or unable to express them in a way people understand. Rod often served as our translator.

With successful parks in the ground, skateboarding is no longer the neighborhood bogeyman, the convenient surrogate for fear of change. In this new era SPS looks forward to developing an even more collaborative relationship with Rod’s successor. For now though, cheers to Rod for having our backs over the years. Portland’s skatepark system enjoys a momentum skaters in every other city would kill for. It wouldn’t be happening without Rod Wojtanik.

August 2007 Best of the City ’07 issue of Portland Monthly has a couple of nice shots of Pier Park skatepark in case you wanted a pinup of duelling inverts by MC and Steve Grover. Should hit the newsstands any day now.

We have reissued the sold out Pier Park and Glenhaven Opening Day t-shirts through Skate Portland on CafePress. They’ll cost you a little more because they cost us more and you’ll have to pay shipping but if you want one in one of our sold out sizes, that’s the only place to get them.

We still have some women’s and kids sizes of the original Pier Park shirts in our web store.

SOLV-IT cleanup day was today and several volunteers turned out to clean up the Pier Park Skatepark. Folks picked up trash and worked on graffiti removal and coverup. It was four and a half hours of hard work coordinated by The Friends of Pier Park and supported by Portland Parks and Recreation. Thanks for your hard work everyone. The park looks great. It’s nice to be able to ride without the distraction of really dumb graffiti.

Photos by Rich Burton and Kathleen and Mark Conahan