Skateboard Park

Open space has taken on a new meaning in Medford, where officials are considering building a $175,000 skateboard park on land preserved through the state Green Acres program. At Wednesday's council meeting, scheduled for 7:30 p.m., recreation officials will present a choice of uses to the five-member board: an amphitheater with an A-frame roof over an outdoor stage, or a skateboard park with large quarter-pipe jumps, curved ramps, and a pyramid-shaped obstacle course called a "bonecrusher.

Responding to a grassroots effort by in-line skaters and skateboarders, Lower Merion's recreation director has pledged to look into establishing what she said could become the Main Line's only skateboard park. Lindsay L. Taylor told the township's recreation committee Tuesday night that she would provide a complete report on the feasibility of a park in June. She said the report would include recommended sites and construction costs. About a dozen skaters and a few supportive parents attended the meeting Tuesday night.

Dude, what's the deal? Officials here promised almost a year ago to build a skateboard park, a place where the township's boarders could flip and twist without fear of police and neighbors. But today, the heavy plastic wheels and their baggy-clothed riders are still rolling on the wrong side of the law. Officials said last week that although they have several locations scouted out, it would be almost another year before the park was built. Last October, Mayor Rick Taylor pledged his support and the town's cooperation after a group of skateboarders, tired of getting kicked out of schoolyards, showed up at a Township Committee meeting to ask for a park of their own. That group was led by John Wolfe, a self-described "mellow guy" who has been skating since age 14, took up the cause the hard way. Wolfe, 22, and more than a dozen friends had been arrested during a police raid in the winter of 1993 near Franklin Elementary School.

Ronnie James Dio of Birdsboro, Pa., rides the rim at the skateboard park under Interstate 95 in South Philadelphia yesterday. Cloudy skines and warm temperatures may make today a good day to hang outside.

FRANKLIN Delano Roosevelt Park is a 97-year-old jewel of the Fairmount Park system, 300 acres of sporting fields, tennis courts, lakes, a boathouse, walking trails and a skateboard park in South Philly. And it now costs $30 to use this city-owned expanse if you drive there on a day when the Eagles have a home game. Not going to the game? Doesn't matter. Mark Focht, the first deputy commissioner for the city's Department of Parks & Recreation, said that some Eagles fans were scamming a system that allowed park users to enter for free.

A skateboard park on the banks of the Schuylkill is worth pursuing, the head of city planning told the Fairmount Park Commission yesterday. Stating she was "a convert" to the sport, Maxine Griffith said she wanted "to seek a team of folks to take a look at the site from a design standpoint. " Griffith also wants to assemble an advisory board that would examine landscaping, access, transportation and other issues raised by the river site, which is behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Park commissioners, who had been mulling over the possibility of a skate park in Franklin Square, deferred to Griffith's suggestion.

When the Township Council gave preliminary approval last week to constructing a $220,000 skateboard park in town, the decision represented more than a routine appropriation for a recreational facility. It was a significant step in an effort begun nearly a year ago by Nick DiBlasi's eighth-grade social studies class at Marlton Middle School. What started as a homework assignment evolved into a project to make the first skateboard park in Evesham a reality. It took the students through every step of the system, from organizing to planning to finding potential sites to presenting their proposals to the council.

Evesham Township, where I've lived very happily for 30 years, owns a golf course that is about $10 million in the red. To bail out the Indian Spring Country Club, the Township Council is studying raising municipal taxes. At the same time, Evesham is making plans to spend a mere pittance - $220,000 - to build a skateboard park so that kids who don't partake of the township's baseball fields, soccer fields, football fields, street hockey rinks, tennis courts (and, oh, yes, golf course)

Officials and parents are addressing issues concerning safety and supervision at the David Gentile Skate Park. Robert J. McBride, Moorestown's director of parks and recreation, said the skateboard park was not in danger of closing, but one parent warned the potential for losing the park exists if skaters don't start obeying helmet rules and parents don't get more involved with supervision. The 15,000-square-foot facility at Wesley Bishop Park on Church Street opened a year ago. Construction of the skateboard park, which cost $317,000 to build, was partially funded by a $120,000 donation from Joan Gentile, the mother of David Gentile, a Moorestown High School football player who was paralyzed during a game in 1979.

Skateboarders listened politely yesterday as Mayor Rendell extolled the new skateboard park, tucked under Interstate 95 at the edge of Franklin D. Roosevelt Park, and then they predicted that it wouldn't work. The newly asphalted patch under the viaduct, studded with plywood and concrete ramps and pyramids, will never take the place of forbidden John F. Kennedy Plaza, a.k.a. Love Park, the skateboarders said. "We're still going to skate Love Park," said Ryan Gawronski of Haddon Heights, N.J. "I usually just skate around the streets of Philadelphia.

VENTNOR, N.J. - The curious, the sentimental, and perhaps even a serious buyer or two showed up Sunday for a real estate open house at Villa St. Joseph by the Sea, the beachfront mansion to be auctioned off Sept. 15 by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Long a vacation retreat for retired priests, the 19-room, 9,800-square-foot house is a luxury the cash-strapped archdiocese can no longer justify. It is "inconsistent with the mission" of the church, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said last week.

VENTNOR, N.J. - The curious, the sentimental and perhaps even a serious buyer or two showed up Sunday for a real-estate open house at Villa St. Joseph by the Sea, the beachfront mansion to be auctioned off Sept. 15 by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Long a vacation retreat for retired priests, the 19-room, 9,800-square-foot house is a luxury the cash-strapped Archdiocese can no longer justify. It is "inconsistent with the mission" of the church, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said last week.

Blocked by industrial buildings, the Schuylkill has long lived up to its Dutch name — hidden river — for the communities that border it. Monday, one segment of the river officially comes out of hiding with the new Grays Ferry Crescent park, opening up a once-polluted tract to walkers, bicyclers, fishermen, and wildlife enthusiasts. The park has cost city and state agencies and private donors $2.85 million to construct. It is the latest phase of an ongoing effort to line the length of the Schuylkill in Philadelphia, from Fairmount Park to Fort Mifflin by Philadelphia International Airport, with trails.

FRANKLIN Delano Roosevelt Park is a 97-year-old jewel of the Fairmount Park system, 300 acres of sporting fields, tennis courts, lakes, a boathouse, walking trails and a skateboard park in South Philly. And it now costs $30 to use this city-owned expanse if you drive there on a day when the Eagles have a home game. Not going to the game? Doesn't matter. Mark Focht, the first deputy commissioner for the city's Department of Parks & Recreation, said that some Eagles fans were scamming a system that allowed park users to enter for free.

Intriguing and obliquely involving, Paranoid Park is Gus Van Sant's film approximation of concrete music. That is, rather than a conventional three-act drama like the director's Finding Forrester or Good Will Hunting , it's composed of real-world sounds and textures that express a teenager's shifting states of mind and dawning conscience. As in Elephant , Van Sant's lyrical evocation of high school life in the moments leading up to a Columbine-like massacre, the director uses impressionistic means to suggest the alienation of a skateboarder who may be involved in the death of a railroad security guard.

The Fairmount Park Commission yesterday gave final approval for renovations and construction that could transform neglected Franklin Square into a lively tourist and neighborhood destination, replete with a carousel and a miniature-golf course. The $8 million project, proposed by Once Upon A Nation, the private tour and storytelling organization that began operating in Independence National Historical Park this year, also includes renovation of the square's central 19th-century fountain.

Plans for an expansive, two-acre skateboard park near the Schuylkill, below the Philadelphia Museum of Art, received preliminary approval yesterday from the Fairmount Park Commission. The $5 million park, proposed after the city's 2002 crackdown on skateboarding and redesign of JFK Plaza - also known as LOVE Park - would offer sweeping vistas of the river and Art Museum. No funding is on hand, but Joshua H. Nims, a founder of the Schuylkill River Skatepark Fund, said there was considerable corporate interest in the project.

Skateboarders are closer to getting a new park in Philadelphia. Architects and designers have created two proposed renderings of Schuylkill River Skatepark, which will be just south of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And in May, they will unveil the final rendering after considering community input on both versions. The "shard scheme" can best be described as "fingers in the landscape," said architect Anthony Bracali. It would feature a variety of "skatable sculptures," terraces and curved benches and offer great views along the Schuylkill.

With the Von Colln Memorial Field on the Parkway a potential site of a new Barnes Foundation art gallery, parents whose children use the ball fields there reacted angrily yesterday at the prospect of losing them. And, they said, they will not give up the fields without a fight. Taking the fields would happen "over my dead body," said Joanne Hart, who coached Little League at the fields for 22 years and who now is an umpire. Hart helped lead a previous fight against relocating the fields and said she would do it again.

Phila. did right to refuse a LOVE Park offer Why do The Inquirer and so many others who supposedly are civic leaders support the destructive activity of skateboarding in LOVE Park ("Money can't buy LOVE Park," June 2)? As the city of Philadelphia has rightly determined, street skateboarding is as damaging to the park as vandalism and graffiti. The damage caused to the edges of stone walls by grinding skateboard and bicycle frames is permanent, save for removing and replacing entire slabs of granite.