Main Street skate shop is on the move
WOONSOCKET – After calling Main Street home for her Craft BMX bike and skateboard shop for the past three years, Susan Kirwan recently saw an opportunity to get closer to the future of the sports in city and decided to act.
The local businesswoman packed up her store front business at 128 Main St. and trucked it over to 126 Hamlet Avenue where she now hopes to benefit from Blackstone Valley Bikeway traffic passing her store and the city’s in-theworks BMX and skateboard park next to the middle school complex’s basketball courts.
The park is being designed right now and it is expected to be installed in time for the coming summer, Kirwan said on Friday.
Kirwan’s patrons, of course, were heavily involved in convincing the City Council and Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt’s administration to support development of the new recreational resource and it only made sense to try to move her business a little closer to that area, Kirwan explained.
The problem she faced immediately, however, was a lack of available retail space in the Hamlet Avenue area nearest the middle school complex.
In the end, she settled on a former restaurant space located in the multi-use apartment and business building near the Providence & Worcester Railroad crossing of Hamlet, just up from what used to be the French Worsted mill complex.
“This was the only available retail space right near here,” Kirwan said at her new shop on Friday.
The space was the right size when she stopped in to see it, but it also needed to be renovated a bit to be suitable for the bike and skateboard business she would move from Main Street, Kirwan said.
Luckily for Craft, Kirwan’s other job is as a maintenance staffer for the Hedco property management company in Woonsocket, and she made good use of her skills while getting the new shop ready for business.
The freshly painted space has a service and display counter along the back wall of the shop, a skateboard display off to one side and a rack for new BMX bikes on the other.
Customers can purchase a quality “deck” for a skateboard and then add all the accessories, mounts and wheels, to get it rolling.
Craft carries Somnambulist boards made in Providence and also a City Council board produced locally. Another local product for sale is the Lucky Kat grip tape made to give decks a gritty surface for doing tricks.
The bikes offered for sale include FIT pro BMX bikes and a Sub Rosa line.
Some customers coming into Craft like to purchase all the gear needed to assemble a board and then do the work themselves. Kirwan said Craft will give those customers the tools they need if they want to do the assembly at the shop and they are also helpful in providing tips and advice on completing a board.
Other customers just want to purchase everything outright and let Kirwan put the board together.
Kirwan got involved with the sport as a way to support the local riders and boarders she knew. Her son Liam Keen, 17, is an aficionado of the sport as are many of his friends.
It was a group of Craft customers, in fact, that started making appearances before the City Council in the hopes of getting support to have a riding park set aside in the city. Officials eventually came around to the idea after Craft helped to sponsor BMX and skateboard demonstration events at the middle school during the past two summers.
When the most recent “Get up, Get out and Ride,” event was held in July, more than 300 people stopped by to participate, Kirwan noted. Craft helped build the temporary ramps and trick equipment for the riding course and the American Ramp Co. also brought along one of its portable pump tracks to the event.
“The biggest thing for my business is to provide support for these athletes and validation for what they do,” Kirwan said. “And to help them get a skate park, that is a goal, too,” she said.
When it finally looked like the latter would happen, Kirwan said she knew had to get closer to the location in order to remain a resource to the riders and boarders who would visit it.
The fact the bike path’s route out of city’s Rivers Edge Recreational complex goes right by the store on its way up Hamlet was an added asset, she noted. And with plenty of people stopping in to see what the new shop has to offer, Kirwan has no regrets over making the move from Main Street. “In order to expand my customer base, I had to move here,” she said.
With her proximity to where the “rolling” sports will be happening in the city in the future, Kirwan believes Craft will continue to draw support from the BMX and boarding community.
“I don’t want to be another business in the city that closes and with this exposure on Hamlet I think things will be a lot better,” she said.