Tyson Skate Park: Behind Schedule, but finally legit

Construction on the long-anticipated public skate park, originally announced to begin this week, has been delayed at least four months. The skate park is still planned to go into the space at the northeast corner of Tyson Park the UT women’s softball team has been leasing from the city for years, but the softballers are now moving to UT’s athletic complex on former ag-campus land across the river. The UT women’s softball team, until Sunday a contender for the national title, decided they needed to return to the Tyson softball field for practice in the early fall.

Mayor Bill Haslam’s spokesperson Amy Nolan says they expect work, to be done by well-known park designer and builder Wally Hallyday of California Skate Park, to commence in October, to be completed, depending on weather, in early ‘07.

The project signals a sea change in the city’s attitude toward what some claim is America’s fastest-growing sport. About a decade ago, a prominent civic leaderupon retirement offered a grim warning to his assembled peers about the danger of tolerating skateboarders, who he said were destructive of downtown buildings and a hazard to the elderly. Around the same time, city council voted to ban skateboarding from Market Square. Later, some noted ruefully that before the massively refurbished World’s Fair Park was properly open, its marble features were already showing the wear of skateboarding.

To non-skateboarders, the idea of the city paying to build a skate park might have had the feel of paying ransom. Or, at least, a way to keep kids off the street and out of bigger trouble.

City Councilman Chris Woodhull, leader of the inner-city youth group Tribe One, sees it more as a positive amenity for the city.

“It’s important symbolically, where we’re going as a community,” he says. “To me, Knoxville building a skate park is one of the signs that we are growing up as a city.” Woodhull, a middle-aged guy who has learned to skateboard seemingly to understand the phenomenon, is convinced of the civic value of a skate park.

“It’s one of the safest sports,” he says. That may seem counterintuitive to those who’ve seen skateboarders sailing through the air high above hard concrete surfaces. Woodhull insists, “Risk-management assessments say it’s safer than baseball and football.”

“But right now there’s no legal place to skate.” Larger cities like Nashville and Louisville have public skate parks; smaller cities like Chattanooga and Asheville do, too. Knoxville doesn’t.

He has heard estimates that there may be as many as 20,000 skateboarders in Knox County. That may be high, but they certainly number in the thousands. “What I find is all this enthusiasm from people, rich, poor, masters in planning and guys who want to work on refrigerators for the rest of their lives, all interested in building this skate park.”

Some have raised concerns about the location chosen by a city-sponsored task force co-chaired by Woodhull. The well-kept diamond at Tyson Park works well as a softball field. Woodhull says they mulled over other sites, especially a ruined industrial area along the banks of Second Creek below the interstates known to downtown artists as the Spaghetti Bowl and to illegal skateboarders as “the Spot.” The existing concrete there, Woodhull says, is “silky smooth.” It also offers a certain amount of urban/subversive credibility.

But Woodhull says the railroad that owns most of that area wouldn’t sell. “We wanted a site already owned by the city—and known to people in Knoxville.” The softball field about to be abandoned by the Lady Vols at Tyson Park seemed to fit the bill.

Providing local skaters with a place to practice their sport is an urban amenity, but the economic benefit to the city may come from the skaters it draws from outside of the region.

The fact that it’s near an interstate exit was also important, Woodhull says. “People think of Knoxville as the city you go through,” he says. Nashville’s skate park currently draws about 2,000 visitors a week. (Such a skate park in Knoxville would outperform the convention center much of the time, and might seem a relative bargain.)

So far, the city and county have each chipped in $200,000; Lamar Outdoor Advertising has contributed another $100,000. Woodhull says with about $400,000 more, the skate park could be one of the biggest skating draws in the Southeast. The task force is working on raising that amount from private sources.

“We’re learning from their mistakes,” says Woodhull. “Ours will be better than Chattanooga, Nashville, Asheville. It will be a very well-designed skate park.

“Every community needs a bow tie,” Woodhull says, an extra that completes the picture. “This skate park can be our bow tie.”
—Jack Neely