Readers can submit descriptions of parks that are not mentioned here, and update outdated information. All parks are outdoors unless otherwise mentioned.
Boston
In a few years, Boston may get the long overdue “world class” skatepark we deserve. Currently, there is the East Boston Skatepark, located near the Mavericks T station, which is accessible by the Blue Line. The park has received some coverage in EST videos, and by watching Ryan Gallant and PJ Ladd shred there, one can see that it is not the ideal place to skate. It is made out of the pre-fabricated concrete (a.k.a. shituate, from the town of Scituate, which was the first town to get one of those parks) that is a poor excuse for a skatepark. The exception that makes the park worth skating is the big ledge that goes down one of the banks.
The Hyde Park skatepark is a different story. A few years ago when the park first opened, I was skating the Copley Square fountain and a cop drove by and shouted on a bullhorn, “Go to Hyde Park!” The people I was skating with laughed, but I when visited the park for my first time, I was pleasantly surprised. It has nice bowl, fiberglass mini ramp, and a little street course. The street course has a seven stair with low handrails, some boxes, and a two-sided pyramid with a rough ledge that runs across and down. I don’t know if anyone ever fixed the ledge, but last time I was there it wasn’t grindable. The bowl is nice, but seems to be a bit open and spread out. That isn’t much of a problem, it just requires some pumping to keep speed. For directions, visit www.skateparklist.com.
During the summer of 2003, the rumor mill started churning with stories that Boston was on its way to getting a skatepark that would rival Louisville’s “Extreme Park,” the gem down in Kentucky that is open twenty-four hours a day, lit up like a baseball stadium, and offers every type of skate terrain that you need. A couple of articles were printed in The Boston Globe and clarified that plans for the Boston skatepark were in the works, but nothing would be coming in the immediate future. The Charles River Conservancy is heading up the project, and local pro for Vehicle Skateboards, Vanik Hacobian, is consulting with them and will help design the park. The park is supposed to be constructed under the new Leonard Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, near where the Big Dig is taking place. If the park is built under the bridge, it will be sheltered from rain, and will be easily accessible by car and train. Do not expect the park to be done anytime soon though, because a park the magnitude of Louisville’s could take a year or two. For now, the streets are the only skatepark we need, just watch out for the cops. Visit http://www.charlesriverconservancy.org/projects/Skatepark/young_athletes.html for more details.
Stoneham’s skatepark used to be good, but then it fell apart because of a lack of maintenance. It might not even be there anymore. The town itself has some pretty good skate spots. For information and directions, call Coliseum in Melrose at 781-662-3600, or visit their website at www.coliseumskate.com.
There are a couple of shituates in the area, but I would not go out of my way to find them, there are better places to skate in the area.
Heading north from the city toward Cape Ann, there is the quaint little town of Marblehead. They have a fun skatepark that has a pyramid with a ledge and a hip, as well as a box, quarter pipes, banks, and a flat bar. It is a good place to work on street tricks, and there is also enough room to skate flat ground. Like many parks though, age has taken a toll on it and there are efforts underway to rebuild it. Visit www.brickhouseboards.com for information and directions, or to donate money for the skatepark.
North Andover
The Aplin Skatepark in North Andover was one of the only skateparks in the state during the early and mid nineties. It is tiny compared to today’s standards, but it used to be a hot spot. Rumor has it that a pro contest was held there once and Jamie Thomas skated in it. The park has a long, worn down one-foot ledge, a higher ledge, a short and steep pyramid, a couple of banks, and whatever else has popped up over the years. To get directions, call Elevation skate shop in North Andover, and say hi to Josh.
New North Andover Skatepark
Th The town realized the Aplin park was outdated, so North Andover Youth Services raised money and had a new park built behind the Youth Center. The ramps were built by Zero Gravity, which is based in Rutland, VT and is owned by a guy named Frank. Zero Gravity will go to your house and build you a ramp if you have the money. Go to www.zgravsk8.com for details. Frank is the same guy who built the ramps at the Andover park. The North Andover park is smaller than the Andover park, but still costs money to enter and helmets are required. The park has quarter pipes, a pyramid, rails, banks, and a box. For more information, go to this website: http://www.nayouth.com/html/skate_area.html.
For such a crappy park, the Methuen skatepark has produced more than its share of good skateboarders. The park used to be made out of wood, then the city left it there to rot and fall apart. Rather than ditch the park and find somewhere else to skate, the locals fixed the ramps, built new boxes, and improvised with the ailing condition of the place, just like most skaters in New England constantly have to improvise with their elements, whether it involves skating cracked pavement or dealing with freezing cold temperatures. The city finally took action and what did it produce? It produced a pre-fabricated “shituate” cement park. They built the new park in the tennis court next to the site of the old park. The park now has a few quarterpipes, a pyramid with a rail, some flat bars, and maybe a box or two. The old wooden quarter pipe sits in the background, waiting to be devoured by termites or by vandals. The park can be fun if you are in the area. You may get the place to yourself for hours, or you may get there and see twenty skaters all crammed into the tennis court. All different types of people roll though: rippers, hessians, thugs, little kids, big-mouthed adolescent girls, high school kids looking for a place to smoke pot, cops looking for the kids with the pot, people taking their dogs for a walk, and everything else in-between. To get there, take route 93 to exit 46. Go around the rotary until you see the exit for route 110, heading to Methuen and Lawrence (it is the first right if you are coming from the south). Turn right at the first set of lights, then turn right after the car wash where all of the baseball fields are. The skatepark is at the end of the parking lot.
Somewhere in Haverhill there is a small park that has a good flat bar and not much else. Find it if you want. The city itself has some fun street spots too, including the parking deck downtown. The deck is great when it is raining out. There are fun manual pads and plenty of room to skate flat ground. It used to be a popular spot in the Video Days era of the mid-90’s. Watch out for cops.
Yet another pre-fab park, but this one is kind of fun. The highlight of the Salisbury skatepark is the one-foot high mini halfpipe. It is good for kids, beginners, and people who like to skate unusual terrain. The park also has some banks, rails, boxes, quaterpipes, and a four-foot mini. It is lit up at night and it is a stone’s throw from Salisbury beach. The park can get crowded at times during the summer, even in the middle of the night. Skating the cracked and ill-maintained cement of a pre-fabricated skatepark can be frustrating, but Salisbury can still be a fun place to skate and hang out. To get there, take route 495 to the Beaches exit. Then follow the signs to Salisbury beach. Once you are approaching the beach, the park is on your right, before the rotary. There is a big parking lot behind the bus stop.
This park has a pre-fab street course and a big wooden six-foot mini ramp. The mini ramp is why most people go to the park. It is big, fast, and has thick coping. The park also has some little banks, rails, and quarter pipes. It can be a good stop if you are on the way to the beach in the summer, or the surf is flat and you don’t have money to go to Rye Airfield. There is no supervision and no lights. To find out the best way to get there, call Zap Stix Surf and Skate in Seabrook, NH.
The West Coast Company Airspeed, who is responsible for many of the concrete parks in Colorado, Utah, and other western states, made Newburyport’s dream come true. The concrete is smooth, the bowls are fast, and it holds up well against the bad weather that wears down many New England skateparks. The park consists of three bowls. There is the mini bowl, the intermediate bowl, and the vert bowl. The vert bowl is ten feet in the deep end, and eight feet in the shallow end. It has nice hips for airs, and escalated coping for long grinds. The shallow end has a spine that connects with the intermediate bowl. The intermediate bowl varies from about four to six feet deep, all the way around. It has a pyramid on one side, and a roll-in/hip type thing on the other side. It is a very unique set-up with thousands of options for lines. There is even a rail positioned so that someone can launch out of the bowl and do a trick on the rail. The mini bowl is fun, it is about three feet or so deep. It has a roll-in and various hips and places to get air and do long grinds. Aside from a long rail that goes down a mellow bank, and a few other various little flat bars, there isn’t really much for a street course at this park. It can get crowded at times, so watch out for collisions. There is a park staff that makes sure everyone wears a helmet, which you are likely to want at this park anyway. It is located behind the town’s high school, so it is only open after school and on the weekends. It is closed when it rains and during the winter. As far as I know it is free to skate there. Plum Island is about a five-minute drive from the park, which can be handy for a swim at the beach after a sweaty session in the summertime. For directions, go to www.mapquest.com and type in Newburyport High School, or go to www.skateparklist.com and go to the Mass. section.
Another good concrete park. It is similar to Newburyport, it is mostly tranny with a big pyramid. There were some issues with trash that caused it to be shut down for a little while, but I think that was cleared up. Visit www.skateparklist.com or call Evan at Eastern Boarder in Danvers for directions: (978) 777-5650.
I’m not even going to try to explain this one. If you don’t already know about it,
visit www.ryeairfield.com.
At All Around Sports in Hampstead, NH there is a small indoor skatepark, along with indoor soccer fields, and batting cages. The ramps are made out of wood. There is a street section with pryamids that have ledges and rails on top of them, banks of different sizes, a bank to wall ride, a kinked rail, flat box, and a kinked box. It also has a fun four-foot mini ramp with five-foot extensions. The park is a good place to skate in the winter. It gets crowded on the weekends, but is usually pretty empty on weeknights, and the people that are there are usually cool. Helmets and waivers are required. It also costs money and there are “sessions” that last a few hours, and after they are over you have to leave or pay for another session. The place is located off of exit 2 on route 93, about 15 minutes from the Massachusetts border. For more information and better directions, go to www.allaroundsportsnh.com.
There is a good park up in the sticks of Londonderry. You know you are in New Hampshire because when you look behind the park, it is a forest for as far as the eye can see. It is a pretty big outdoor park with all the basic stuff you need. It has a good European style setup, with pyramids in the middle, and banks and quarters that line each wall facing the center. There are tons of rails, ledges, hips, a quarter bowl, a five-foot mini ramp with a spine, a vert wall, a nice long flat grinding box and rail, and room to skate flat ground. The metal ramps were made by a skatepark contractor named Woodsy, who is based out of Burlington, VT and owns Talent Skatepark in South Burlington. The ramps are a well-constructed, just watch out for hot days when the sun beams off of them. During the summer, it feels like it is about ten degrees hotter inside the skatepark. The park is lined with a metal fence and there is a tight entryway that keeps bikes out. If you go there before school gets out on a weekday you are likely to have the place to yourself. It gets more crowded after school and on weekends, but there is still room for everyone. Watch out for white trash kids who smoke cigarettes and spit everywhere. I once put my hand on top of the rail so I could lean against something while I waited for my turn to drop into the mini ramp, and my palm landed in someone’s phlegm. To get directions to the park, go to www.skateparklist.com and go to the New Hampshire section.
Holy hesh this place has a gnarly pool! The bowl is made like a real pool, with tons of vert, real pool coping, tiles, a drain, and a death box. It is extremely deep in the deep end, and still has a couple feet of vert in the shallow end. The rest of the park is pretty interesting. It has a three-quarter bowl with a big tombstone-shaped extension that faces the street course. The coping escalates up and over the tombstone, and the bowl has hips on both sides. There is a pyramid with a rail that across the top and down one side, quarter pipes, banks, and an amoeba that is a challenge even to ollie over. There is a good ledge that goes down one of the banks. It is about two-feet high, and is on the left as you roll up to it (backside for regular stance, frontside for goofy). The park is lit at night, but sometimes they don’t come on until an hour and half after it gets dark. There are different ways to get there, depending on where you are coming from. Call Eastern Boarder in Nashua for directions: 603-888-0722.
There are four skateparks in Lowell, but they all pre-fab. None of them are worth going out of your way for, but if I were to pick a favorite it would be the one at Hadley Park, located on western end of Pawtucket St., near Taco Bell. It has all the pre-fab specials, including a four-foot mini ramp, a grinding box, rails going down and off of stuff, and random objects that appear one in awhile. More often than not, the park is lit at night. Sometimes the city shuts off the power supply and leaves that park in the dark, but it is only a matter of time until a local climbs the telephone pole and flips the switch. The locals also shovel the park after snowstorms, making it one of the only places in Lowell that is skateable in the winter. Like Methuen, this park isn’t that great but the local kids rip. Good sessions occur almost every night during the summer, thanks to the lights. The rest of the city can be a good place to search for street spots, but it may require an open mind. For a city the size of Lowell, there are not that many great spots. It seems like there is something wrong with almost everything; the pavement sucks, the ledges are too rough, there are cracks everywhere, etc. But after a good search, some uninhabited spots can be revealed. Lowell is even home to a UMass. Unfortunately, UMass Lowell is not a mecca of skate spots like UMass Amherst and Dartmouth are. The Lowell campus can be good with some angle iron and big pop to get onto the four-foot plus hubba ledges going down the various sets of stairs. There are also monstrous gaps and fifteen stair rails with little run up space. The only exception to the gnar is on South Campus, off of Pawtucket St. (actually on the way to Hadley park), where there are about ten sets of two stairs in a row, ending at a steep nine stair with a rail and a sidewalk where the curb sticks up. Get some plywood for the landing and the rail is all yours. Watch out though, the university police are never far away.
The Ryan C. Joubert Memorial Skatepark just opened over the summer and I have not been there yet, but it looks like it is worth mentioning. It looks like an excellent park with an interesting story behind it. Go to this website to see pictures and find out about the park: www.fitchburgskatepark.com.
These are the two locations of Skater Paradise. They are good indoor parks, which is an obvious necessity to make sure you get to skate all year. Both are good, both cost money and require helmets, both are worth going to. Visit their website for details: http://www.skaterparadise1.com.
Another indoor park, Skater’s Edge looks like a fun place to skate. I have not been there yet, but have heard rave reviews. Check it out at http://www.skatersedgeinc.com/skedgewm_001.htm.
Middleton, RI
Skater Paradise is probably the most famous skatepark in the Northeast. It is a level in one of the Tony Hawk games, has been shown in numerous videos, and is a frequent stop for demos and contests. The park is indoors and is open year round. It is huge and has something for everybody. Helmets are required and it can get extremely busy in the winter, and hot in the summer. To find out more, go to http://www.skaterisland.com.