Can a skatepark transform a troubled community?
- Text by Alex King
“We grew up skating the most crappiest skatepark so we just adapted to hellish shit, like fat ass cracks at the top of the stair sets,” says Lem West, a skater from Oakland, California. “Oakland skaters got a way different style to skaters from all other parts of the world. Go big or go home really.”
Lem and his best friend Terrell Newell – who star in the awesome new short documentary Skateboarding in Oakland – grew up together skating the streets of West Oakland, a community with more than its fair share of problems. Lem was lucky to be left with just a flesh wound after being struck in the ankle by a stray bullet and both teenagers have friends who’ve been killed. Skateboarding is one of few positive outlets for young people in a neighbourhood viewed with wariness by outsiders, that, in Lem’s words, suffers from “lots of negativity.”
High school teacher and Oakland resident, Keith “K-Dub” Williams recognised the role skateboarding could play in improving the choices for local kids and in 2007 he began work on turning unused space in West Oakland’s DeFremery Park, which locals refer to as just ’Town Park’, into a skatepark.
“No city has any strength if the young people aren’t engaged,” he explains. “If you can build in front of them, for them, and also have them part of the process, then they can take ownership of what they have.”
Keith began by taking disused wooden ramps from a nearby YMCA skatepark and reassembling them in Town Park, taking rails off fences and building new obstacles with bits of wood. His DIY build was just the beginning, and Keith always hoped to one day create a concrete park but local kids flocked to what he’d built and the local skate community grew and became stronger.
When Levi’s Skateboarding heard about the project, they sent Al Partanen, Josh Matthews, Marius Sylvanen and Pat Moran to help transforming it into the proper concrete park that Keith had always hoped it would become.
The effect on local skaters has been huge and everyone involved hopes skateboarding will continue helping make the West Oakland community stronger. Lem is stoked: “I feel like skateboarding opens doors to a wonderful life.”
Huck visits Town Park for The Skateboarding Special, part two, coming this August. Stay locked!
You might like
“Like skating an amphitheatre”: 50 years of the South Bank skatepark, in photos
Skate 50 — A new exhibition celebrates half a century of British skateboarding’s spiritual centre. Noah Petersons traces the Undercroft’s history and enduring presence as one of the world’s most iconic spots.
Written by: Noah Petersons
“I didn’t care if I got sacked”: Sleazenation’s Scott King in conversation with Radge’s Meg McWilliams
Radgenation — For our 20th Anniversary Issue, Huck’s editor Josh Jones sits down with the legendary art director and the founder of a new magazine from England’s northeast to talk about taking risks, crafting singular covers and disrupting the middle class dominance of the creative industries.
Written by: Josh Jones
Free-spirited, otherworldly portraits of Mexico City’s queer youth
Birds — Pieter Henket’s new collaborative photobook creates a stage for CDMX’s LGBTQ+ community to express themselves without limitations, styling themselves with wild outfits that subvert gender and tradition.
Written by: Isaac Muk
The suave style and subtle codes of gay San Francisco in the ’70s
Seminal Works — Hal Fischer’s new photobook explores the photographer’s archive, in which he documented the street fashion and culture of the city post-Gay Liberation, and pre-AIDS pandemic.
Written by: Miss Rosen
The Strokes condemn US imperialism in Coachella set
Oblivius — The band finished their performance at the festival’s second weekend with a montage of bombings in Gaza and Iran, along with images of world leaders that the CIA has been accused of overthrowing over the past century.
Written by: Noah Petersons
The stripped, DIY experimentalism of SHOOT zine
Zine Scene — Conceived by photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya in the ’00s, the publication’s photos injected vulnerability into gay portraiture, and provided a window into the characters of the Brooklyn arts scene. A new photobook collates work made across its seven issues.
Written by: Miss Rosen
