New Fall River Skatepark!!

When I was younger and just starting out skateboarding, Fall River had a HUGE skate scene. We had 3 “skate parks” here in Fall River that you could go to on any random afternoon & find atleast 6+ people at each park. This is not the case anymore. Over the years, the wear & tear on our parks has been too overbearing for us to handle on our own. Some of us (including myself) decided to go skate in other cities with good skate scenes, like Providence. Some, very few, decided to stay here and try to jimmy-rig the remaining parks we have with bondo & quick-crete. Most quit skateboarding all together. Now, because these parks are all virtually empty, the younger skateboarding generation may not last here. They may leave like my closest friends and I decided to, taking money they could’ve spent on our local businesses elsewhere. In my opinion, the best thing about skateboarding is it’s almost completely FREE to do. Once you buy a skateboard and the parts for it, you can do it whenever & wherever you want to. You can go skate alone, with friends, with people you’re meeting for the first time at the park (who will probably become your life-long friends.) We’re from Fall River, of course, we’re broke!!!! We don’t have a couple hundred dollars to put our kids into sports camps! We don’t have time to bring them to their scheduled practices and games either! We gotta work! I’m not saying everyone could get into skateboarding, but I’m saying I thought it was the coolest looking thing I had ever seen when I was a kid & I know with enough people at this park everyday, we’ll build an entire new generation of skateboarders. A new generation who will be too focused on learning a new trick to go out and cause trouble. Skateboarding also creates a very tight community for everyone involved. No one gets left out or bullied. All of your friends start to feel like family in a very short amount of time. The community and sense of belonging that a lot of gang members look for when they’re young could be found in a much safer way, right here in skateboarding. Gang violence and crime is one of the biggest problems the city faces today, why not give kids something else to do? We don’t need anymore basketball courts!! Thank you for the abundance of them we have! Kids need to see something else in order to want to be something else and it’s our job to show them. A new skatepark wouldn’t only make a huge dent in our problems that we have at home, a new skatepark would bring in people from all over New England. I know this because my friends and I pile up in the car at least once a month to take a trip somewhere further away than Providence. I’ve been to Weymouth, MA (about an hour drive) 3 times since they opened 2 months ago. These people are going to get hungry, they’re gonna want to stop at your shop for food/drinks/etc. They’re going to want to stop around and see what’s in Fall River for a little while. Your Mom and Pop restaurant could be the main stop that a car full of skateboarders NEEDS to take every time they’re coming to skate our new park. They’re gonna spend money here in our city. We’re building a train straight from here to Boston. When I was a kid, we used to drive from here to Quincy and take the red line into Boston to go to Lynch Family Skate Park. Why can’t we have something that skateboarders from Boston want to see out here? New parks are popping up left and right all around New England in the craziest spots and doing super well. We’re only 20 mins from a huge skate scene in New Bedford, 20 mins from a huge skate scene in Providence, 20 mins from a huge skate scene in the Taunton area, and a few songs in the car away from many others. I talked to a man named Brad Siedlecki with Artisan Skateparks, who told me the city already had plans for a park here. He drew up construction designs, met with architects, etc. before the city pulled the funding and spent the money else where. He told me in order to get a park here, we have to get a whole lot of signatures and do a whole lot of bugging the city; which I’m not afraid to do! This city NEEDS a new skate park for countless reasons, but they have no clue they need it. We need these signatures to get this done! Let’s save the youth and save our city!


**If you’re not a skateboarder & participate in some other kind of extreme sport, please don’t feel excluded. I am a skateboarder, so all of the words I chose to use revolve around skateboarding. If you replace that word with BMX, scootering, rollerblading, rollerskating, etc., we all have the same message. All are welcome, all are loved!**