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SKATEBOARDING MAY BE DECLINING NATIONWIDE, BUT NOT HERE
Professional skateboarder Leo Romero grinded rails and performed tricks down the steps at Carnegie’s Pitcher Park Memorial Skatepark during a recent exhibition with a handful of other professionals.
Hundreds of local boarders took cell phone videos, clapped and cheered as they watched pros they only dreamed of meeting glide around their park.
The professionals, including skateboard legend Tony Hawk’s son, Riley, shredded the slick cement for hours Saturday as part of Stay Flared, a skateboarding tour organized by skateboard shoe companies Emerica and Lakai.
While national trends show that fewer people are skateboarding in the U.S. than 10 years ago, local skateboarders say the sport is expanding in the Pittsburgh area, something that is evident at local jam-packed skateboarding events such as the one at Pitcher Park.
“This area has been overlooked as far as the skateboarding community goes, but we’re starting to get national attention here,” said Mary Pitcher, who led the effort to create Pitcher Park in honor of her two sons who drowned in 2008.
You don’t have to look any further than Pitcher Park to see that Pittsburgh’s skateboarding scene is growing beyond the city. Last summer, Tony Hawk and the Birdhouse skateboard team visited the park, which Mrs. Pitcher said attracted people of all ages interested in skateboarding, even those in their 70s.
In 2006, the nation had more than 6.8 million skateboarders, which fell to about 6.3 million in 2014, according to The Outdoor Foundation, which interviews more than 19,000 people for its annual reports.
It is difficult to determine how many people skateboard in the Pittsburgh region.
Evan Smith, a professional skateboarder who lives in Millvale when he is not traveling, said skateboarding is flourishing here.
Mr. Smith said the next step for skateboarding in Pittsburgh is an indoor skate park, something he says riders desperately need. Although Pipes Skate Park in Westmoreland County has an indoor facility, he said the city should have its own central hub where skateboarders from the region can congregate during rainy days and the winter season.
“If we had that hub, it would be a good way to get kids off the street,” said Mr. Smith, who is currently putting on demos and skateboarding with a team in Berlin. “Our art and music movement is already through the roof here in Pittsburgh, and skateboarding goes right along with that.”
Skate parks around the Pittsburgh area have come and gone over the years. Shady Skates, an indoor park in Point Breeze that opened in 1996, closed in December 2001. Mr. Small’s Skatepark in Millvale recently closed after being open for 10 years because the borough wanted to use the building for something else, Mr. Smith said.
The skate parks operated by the Pittsburgh parks department, however, have remained: McKinley Skate Park in Beltzhoover, Tuxedo Street Site near Sheraden Park and West Penn Skate Park in Polish Hill.
But Nick Teodori, who has been skateboarding in the Pittsburgh area for 30 years, described the city parks as “terrible.”
Mr. Teodori, 40, of Polish Hill said he is working with the office of city Councilwoman Deb Gross to revitalize the skate park in Polish Hill. Nathaniel Hanson, the councilwoman’s chief of staff, said they have been exploring potential improvements to the park.
“All these other parks that are way nicer keep getting built on the outskirts of town and are like 15 to 30 minutes away,” said Mr. Teodori, who founded Scumco & Sons Wooden Skateboards five years ago. “I’m just trying to get [a skate park] that’s legitimate and good and skatable built inside city limits.”
While many hope the Polish Hill park gets fixed up, boarders in the region are usually known for their street skating — using rails, steps and street terrain.
In a 2011 interview with skateboard magazine Quartersnacks, Jake Johnson, a professional skateboarder for Alien Workshop Skateboards who has lived in Pittsburgh, said a lot of people in the region aren’t “skating for any image, and most of the skaters out there are from very rural areas [outside] the city.”
In the city, “there’s nothing to skating except gnarly rugged street spots …,” Mr. Johnson, who is known for his wall ride skateboard maneuver, told Quartersnacks.
Inside the One Up Skate Shop on the South Side, a photograph of people skateboarding in Squirrel Hill in 1988 hangs on a wall. Greg Pasquarella, who opened the shop in 2003, said many notable boarders have come from the City of Bridges.
From professionals such as Kevin Taylor, who rides for Zoo York Skateboards, to “underground legends,” as Mr. Pasquarella called them, such as the late Matt Reason, people across the country have been motivated by some of the boarders who have come from Pittsburgh. Mr. Reason died in October at age 41 from heart complications related to pneumonia, according to his Facebook page.
As one person who wrote on the condolences page for Mr. Reason put it: “The way you skated was and still is a great inspiration to me and many other skateboarders around the world.”
“More professional skateboarders have come out of Pittsburgh in the last two years than ever before … putting us on the map,” said Mr. Smith, who earned MVP during Thrasher skateboard magazine’s King Of The Road competition in 2014. The two-week competition, in which skateboarders travel across the U.S. and complete challenges, stopped in Pittsburgh last year.
That, Mr. Smith said, is a “huge, huge deal” for local skateboarders and is further evidence that Pittsburgh is staking a claim as a city where the skateboarding culture is thriving.