Skate Parks Are Growing Up

Skateboarding at Paris 2024. Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images.

A punk pastime made massively popular by the Olympics has reached amenity status with ‘skate gardens.’

Skateboarding has rarely been welcomed anywhere. But the boards’ urethane wheels, adopted from roller skates, meant it could be practiced everywhere—on stairs, rails, benches, ramps, culverts and, in the drought-plagued summers of the mid-1970s, empty swimming pools.

Skate parks can be found in the corners of cities: beneath viaducts and overpasses, besides vent stacks and port terminals and in parks on the edge of town. These spaces may evoke skating’s guerilla origins, but they fail to represent skating today: an Olympic phenomenon, a $3.2 billion business and a sport that spans Generations X to Alpha.

While skateboarding has been embraced by the establishment that skaters once had to outrun—elite skaters are competing for gold at the Place de la Concorde in the Paris Olympics—the sport’s everyday facilities typically remain on the fringes of the urban landscape.