Seasnakes vs. the Skateholders – Part 2

Will SeaSk8 be closed for 51 days during the Summer?

Things got weird as soon as the first design meeting on March 25th started, except that wasn’t the first design meeting.

Before every one of the open public design meetings, the Seattle Center is holding a closed “stakeholder” design meeting that includes the Seattle Center staff, and “stakeholders” which includes a representative from the church across the street, the children’s museum, and a representative from each of the festivals that bring a lot of money into the Center. Ryan from the SPAC is also in these meetings, and he told me that they talk about noise, graffiti, etc… but that they also talked about tweaking the design so that the skatepark could be converted into a music performance area or even a place to stage equipment during festivals.

All along we’ve been very clear that this cannot be a multi-purpose space, because not only would closing it during festivals make the park unskateable for 51 days out of the dry season, but it would definitely inform the park’s design in a bad way. John Merner from the Seattle Center has been saying he understands and is on our side, etc… yet they seem to have set up an entire set of parallel meetings expressly for this purpose.

What bothers me the most about this is that the Seattle Center appears to be marginalizing the primary stakeholders in the skatepark: the skate-holders, by sequestering them within a parallel process. The Seattle Center says that they want the meetings to be productive so they split them up to keep them focused, which makes some sense. But why is One Reel providing feedback on the skatepark’s design?

I’ll tell you why: they’ve decided that they are not interested in programming the skatepark with contests or skate jams, or anything else that would benefit the skateboarding community. In fact, every single one of the festival stakeholders are talking about fencing off the entire park and using it for something besides skating. Not only is this a huge missed opportunity, but it’s incredibly risky because there’s a pretty good chance that kids are going to show up with skateboards (with moms in tow) and will be mass pissed. These are 51 of the busiest, sunniest, driest skateboarding days of the year we’re talking about after all.

You can also bet your milk money that Van Der Zalm and Newline are being put into a tight little uncomfortable corner by their clients, The Seattle Center. We know for sure that they are being told to consider all of the input, including that of the non-skate-holders. These guys are going to do a great job no matter what, but if there’s a showdown over a certain feature getting in the way of an alternate non-skateboarding use scenario, who do you think will win out? Will VDZ/Newline go to bat for the skaters even though the marching orders and the paycheck come from the Seattle Center? I think it’s pretty safe to assume at this point that the Seattle Center would work fairly hard to appease the festival organizers who bring so much money into their annual budget, especially over providing something for free to the stinky skateboarding public. Meanwhile, the whole thing reeks of trying to please everyone and in the process pleasing no one.

But let’s put this into perspective… Skateboarders are having to defend their meager pittance from the folks who have control over the vast majority of the resources. The skatepark we are talking about is 9,000 square feet, which is .06 percent of the overall Seattle Center campus. The other 1,297,800 square feet of the campus are off limits to skateboarding. These festival organizers have 99.4% of the campus to program however they’d like, yet they want to put their hands all over our .6 percent.

Is it really worth all this trouble to push us out of the less-than-one-percent of the campus that we can actually use?