Haven for Skateboard Aficionados Coming to Berkeley Skateboard Park Land to Cost $2-8 Million
Cecily Burt, Oakland Tribune December 9, 1999

Berkeley's thrashers are going legit.

The Berkeley City Council has sidestepped opponents' concerns about safety and air quality and unanimously agreed to transform the Harrison Street skateboard park and sports field complex from a field of dreams to turf and concrete reality.

By July, young skateboard aficionados will no longer have to beg adults for rides to faraway skateboard parks. Their illegal sidewalk and school yard riding days will be a distant memory, along with expensive tickets written by intolerant and unamused police officers.

"We don't have a real place to skate" Nick Calvert, a l4-year-old in T-shirt and baggy pants, told council members Tuesday night as he lobbied for the West Berkeley skate park. "We get kicked off places and we get tickets."

Berkeley has only a handful of fields for baseball, soccer and softball. The popularity of soccer and the rising number of young girls participating in team sports has created a scheduling nightmare for coaches and park directors.

Groups have lobbied the mayor and city officials for more sports fields for years. Their pleas turned urgent after the University of California, Berkeley, indicated it would reclaim a portion of the Fielding Field facility on the Albany-Berkeley border to make way for new student housing at University Village.

The city went after a vacant, 6.4-acre parcel owned by UC Berkeley at 5th and Harrison streets, near the Harrison House homeless shelter and adjacent to Fielding Field's soccer and softball complex. The city rezoned the land last year to allow recreational uses.

After months of negotiations, the council voted Tuesday to buy the land for 2.8 million and spend $1.1 million to build the skateboard park and two regulation sized soccer-softball fields, install fencing, lighting and walkways, and construct a field house. The money includes $75,000 to restore portions of Codornices Creek and $125,000 for shelter upgrades. The facility will close at 10 p.m.

This won't be any typical skateboard park. The kids designed their own 18,000-square foot facility -- one of the largest in Northern California -- out of papier-mâché.

They fashioned curbs, raised blocks, four separate bowls, ledges, decks, ramps and an "octagon fun box": the only thing missing is the emergency room for sprains and broken bones.

The skateboard park will cost $200,000 to build, but the city will save money by letting volunteers create the fields. Fielding Field - a lovely swath of green on the north side of Codornices Creek - was created by Doug Fielding and other soccer parents and volunteers.

They persuaded UC Berkeley officials to give them a long-term lease for very little money. Parents and coaches maintain the fields.

Thousands of Berkeley kids play soccer and softball there. It cost the city $100,000 several years ago.

The parents and kids who jammed the City Council chambers Tuesday night with signs saying "Lower Harrison, it's now or never," said it was time kids got their fair share.

"I'm relieved and ecstatic," said Ellen Brotsky, coordinator of the Albany Berkeley Girl's Softball league. It would have been a terrible negative message to the kids if it hadn't happened. They've been going to meetings for four years."

The council dispatched any opposition.

L A Wood warned the kids would be exposed to unhealthy air from the area's industrial facilities. Industrial business owners in the area, such as Libby Labs, Bayer Corp. and Body Time, expressed concern about kids mingling in an area with heavy truck traffic. They asked for security guards at the new park and assurances that complaints about noise and smell from their businesses would not impact industry expansion in West Berkeley.

The council agreed to monitor air quality at the new facility and work with businesses to make sure adequate signs and notices are posted.

But Calvert and Wyatt Miner, 17, said smoke and smells from businesses couldn't possibly be as bad as the auto exhaust fumes the youths inhale in parking garages.