The San Pedro skate community is stoked to see its beloved Channel Street Skatepark rise from the concrete ashes.
Two decades after local community members built a skateboarding mecca piece-by-piece — and eight years after it closed — skaters, and other San Pedro residents and officials celebrated its reopening as a legal skatepark with a ribbon-cutting ceremony this week.
The park’s genesis was in 2002, when skaters took a do-it-yourself approach to building bowls, ramps and rails, progressively creating the 8,000 square foot skateboarding haven. Now, eight years after its widely mourned closure, it has been reborn as a legal skatepark with the blessing of CD-15 Councilman Joe Buscaino.
The park had a thriving first decade of life until a lane expansion of the 110 Freeway caused its closure in 2014.
Local skateboarders, however, refused to see the park go permanently extinct .
San Pedro Skatepark Association founders Andy Harris and Robbie O’Connell, in particular, worked with numerous Los Angeles County and city departments for almost a decade to achieve all the required permissions and safety standards.
And so, the DIY project has been given a second life as a legal skatepark.
Not many skating communities have been able to make a DIY park legal, according to officials. In fact, Channel Street is the largest park known to have undergone this process, said Branimir Kvartuc, spokesman for LA Councilman Joe Buscaino, whose 15th District includes the skatepark.
“There are countless DIY parks in the world these days. I truly believe it is the makeup of this Pedro town that helped this particular park survive,” Harris said during the ribbon-cutting ceremony. “We’re a union town with a long history of doing things our own way. In that respect, Channel Street is very Pedro.”
The reemergence of the legendary park is also thanks to a shift in political attitude.
“(Skaters) in popular culture have been depicted as slackers,” Buscaino said at the Sunday, Aug. 21, ribbon-cutting. “But these skaters, who originally built and now saved Channel Street, are some of the best people in our society.”
Buscaino, a former Los Angeles police officer, also touted the park as a way help tamp down crime.
“This is the one of the greatest crime prevention tools that a city can pray for,” he said.
Buscaino described skateboarders as having ferocious perseverance and being driven, brave and motivated. When he leaves office in November, there will be a skatepark in every community in Council District 15, Buscaino said to the more than 100 ribbon-cutting attendees.
This promise was met by a sea of cheers and the appreciative banging of skateboards on metal rails — which echoed from the pavement, to the concrete bowls, to the underbelly of the 110 Freeway.
The crowd ran the full gamut of the Pedro skate community — from groms to pros and even non-skating supporters. There were skaters in their late 50s, who had been coming to Channel Street for two decades and continued holding their own against the fearless teen shredders. There were also toddlers, still getting the hang of walking, clambering onto boards under the watchful-yet-delighted eyes of their parents.
Seeing how stoked the new generation was for the new park thrilled the original Channel Street skaters.
“Some of the best skateboarders are from this place, Channel Street in San Pedro,” said longtime skater Daewon Song. “I think this place put San Pedro skaters on the map awhile ago, then it got shut down and I think this just puts them back on the map, even stronger.”
Channel Street was the training ground for several professional skaters, including Ronnie Sandoval and Robbie Russo. Buscaino said he believes that an Olympic skateboarder is going to come out of Channel Street one day.
With its legal status and 20-year lease to the San Pedro Skatepark Association, the park now has a sense of security and longevity. But its legendary reputation and dedicated community stem from its DIY roots.
“This park brings people together and people come from all over the world to skate this place,” Song said. “A lot of skate parks, they don’t do that, you know, but this place is a DIY and there was so much tears, blood and sweat put into it.”
The original DIY building process, O’Connell said, made the park feel like it belonged to the community. There was no dictator determining how the park would be built — the skateboarders did it as a collective.
The skaters also remember the dark days for Channel Street, when they battled what felt like infinite bureaucratic red tape. Those struggles inspired local skater April Jones to film a documentary on the effort to reopen the park. It wasn’t long until she too was swept up in the movement, helping advocate and fundraise — and paint — for the park.
On Sunday, she filmed what will be her triumphant closing shots during the ribbon-cutting celebration.
Harris, who has been a central part of the park since it was a single concrete bump, said, for his part, that he is proud of what the community achieved.
“A thriving community of skateboarders and artists,” Harris said, turned “this former lot of illegally dumped trash and vagrancy into a place for physical activity and creativity.”