Jason Filipow

Part sport, part lifestyle, part art, Skateboarding fosters much more than athletic ability. In South Carolina alone skateboarding has produced School Teachers, Business Owners, Photographers, Film and Video Producers and Editors, Graphic Designers, and Fine Artists. Skateboarders pay close attention to form, style, and the overall aesthetic as they try tirelessly to perfect their abilities. Skateboarding is a goal-oriented activity, rewarding only those willing to put in hours of work. The feeling of landing a trick after thousands of tries is one of pure elation, though most skateboarders never let it show. The connection one forms with a skateboard becomes near inseparable for many, becoming a center through which the rest of one’s life flows.

Sculpture by Haroshi using old skateboards.

Charleston bred, internationally acclaimed artist, Kevin Earl Taylor attributes his roots in art as well as his artistic inspiration to skateboarding. Taylor writes, “our creative life was nurtured through skateboarding. Little did we know, but the act of improvising hours of fun from society’s detritus would train our minds to explore the potentiality of our surroundings. Skateboarding was a self-expressive mode, in which we developed individualities and preferences. Through it and the surrounding atmosphere of counter culture, we learned the mechanics of introspection. It was something we did together, but by ourselves. We all had our distinctive styles then, just as we do now. I remember building a ramp using found scraps of wood. For a couple of hours, we’d scoured the ground at the junkyard on Sullivan’s Island, each of us collecting an artillery of rusty, bent and nearly broken nails. With half of a broken brick, we took those and hammered them back into shape. We had learned how to design, conceptualize and construct what we saw in our heads. In 1987, we called them ramps, but now we know, they were indeed our earliest original works.”

Skate and Create 2012 will raise funds to purchase Skate Pass – skateboard PE curriculum and equipment for The Charleston Charter School for Math & Science. This will be the first school in South Carolina to teach skateboarding in PE. Skateboarding distance from the Meeting Street location of the future Charleston County Skateboard park, the Charleston Charter School for Math and Science will have a perfect facility for advanced students to put their lessons to use.

POUR IT NOW, a 501c3 non-profit skateboard advocacy group, is partnering with local and international artists, auctioning donated works of art created using skateboards as media to meet their fundraising goal of five thousand dollars. The funds will be used to pay for the Skate Pass curriculum and equipment, which includes skateboards, pads and helmets for classes of up to thirty students.

The art opening and auction will take place at the end of March, artists of all types are encouraged to participate by picking up a skateboard free of charge from a selection at Continuum Skateshop on Spring street and creating a work of art for the auction. Download the form and fill it out before turning in your artwork at Continuum skateboard shop. All donated art items are due by March 1, 2012. The show date, time and location will be announced on pouritnow.com, Facebook and Twitter.

If you want to be a part of Skate and Create 2012 please submit work by March 1, 2012.  We need artists to create art using a skateboard.  It can be an old or new board.  You can make a painting a sculpture, or anything you deem to be art.  If you have a board to use as your media or canvas, then get to work. Upload photos of your progress to POUR IT NOW’s facebook page or tag #sk8ncre8 on Instagram or Twitter.  If you need a board, then head down to Continuum Skate shop (49 Spring Street, Charleston, SC) and pick up a board.  They have many options available, but if you have one already it would be a huge help. Once you finish your work, make it ready to hang on the wall and drop it off at Continuum SkateShop.

Art created from the skateboards will be auctioned in Charleston in late March (details to come).  Proceeds will allow POUR IT NOW to donate Skate Pass to the Charleston Charter School for Math & Science.  Using Skate Pass will allow CCSMS to teach Skateboarding in PE class.  Our fundraising goal is $5000.

Watch the video to see a previous Skate and Create reception!

Red tape holds up $2M skate park project

By Robert Behre

Recreational skateboarding differs from the issue of using skateboards as transportation, but recreational skateboarders also have been bruised with bad recent news.

A year ago, the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission agreed to spend $2 million to build a new skate park — one of the largest on the East Coast– under the Ravenel Bridge in downtown Charleston.

Today, it’s still unclear when construction will begin.

“Is everyone frustrated? Yes,” PRC Director Tom O’Rourke said this week. “The frustration is the project is slower than we’d like it to be, but the project in no way is dead.”

The problem has stemmed from a bureaucratic Catch 22.

O’Rourke said his agency didn’t want to spend $60,000 or so designing the park if the Federal Highway Administration and S.C. Department of Transportation would not allow it in the state right of way under the bridge. However, those agencies have said they need to see a design before giving their blessing.

“We don’t like to spend money unless we know for sure that things are going to work out,” O’Rourke said. “We asked them, ‘Why don’t you give us the parameters so we can do the plan?’ And we went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.”

O’Rourke said he almost gave up on the site until Charleston Mayor Joe Riley agreed to help get the necessary approvals from the highway agencies.

The bureaucratic standoff has irked those like Shannon Smith, a mom, teacher and avid skateboarder who is on the board of the nonprofit group Pour It Now. She and other Pour It Now members appeared before city officials this week asking for their help in keeping the project on track.

O’Rourke said the Park and Recreation Commission could consider a design-build contract for the park at its next meeting, but he still is unsure when a design will be approved and when construction will start.

“We want to start pouring some concrete,” he added. “I’m sure in a year or two, we’ll look back and be pleased, but right now, it’s pretty darn frustrating.”

Skateboarders face legal roadblocks

Downtown travel mode could soon draw a ticket

By Robert Behre

Jacob Hinton never used his skateboard to get around his hometown of Florence, but when he started classes at the College of Charleston last fall, he found it was the best bet for quick trips downtown.

“It’s safer, more fun and easier to control,” he said of his longboard, a type of skateboard designed more for transit than tricks.

“If you’re going to class, you don’t have to chain it up,” he added. “You can just bring it in with you. You don’t have to worry about it getting stolen.”

William McFadden, 22, a graphic design student at Trident Technical College downtown, has been skateboarding since he was 8 and still uses it to get between his East Side home and class, restaurants and shops.

“It’s a way of transportation for me because I don’t have a car,” he said. “It’s a workout plan for me, too. I can eat anything I want and won’t gain any weight. It’s my everyday exercise.”

Across downtown streets, particularly near colleges, the use of skateboards has risen sharply, much like bicycle use. There’s only one problem: Skateboarding is illegal — at least much of it is — and enforcement is expected to pick up soon.

Enforcement

Until now, skateboard enforcement has been mild.

Both Hinton and McFadden said they have been lectured or warned by police — but not ticketed.

“Once I was skating on the sidewalk, and a cop came up and said, ‘Get off the sidewalk,’ so I’d go in the street,” McFadden said. “One time I was skating in the street, and a cop pulls up and said, ‘Hey, get on the sidewalk.’ ”

However, Charleston City Council soon is expected to give the College of Charleston Public Safety the authority to write municipal tickets so college officers will be able to enforce skateboarding and other city laws.

College of Charleston Public Safety Chief Paul Verrecchia said the change will give his officers another option.

“There’s no state law that covers skateboards,” he said. “To my knowledge, there’s no county ordinance.”

Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said the change stemmed from his conversations with Verrecchia, and Mullen said he hopes enforcement will increase because he is concerned about skateboarders’ safety.

“We want to prevent a tragedy,” Mullen said, adding that if a skateboarder were seriously injured, even killed, then, “Some would ask, ‘Why weren’t you doing enforcement? Why weren’t you taking steps to keep this from happening?’ ”

Verrecchia said: “If I were speaking to students, I would give them a friendly warning that the campus police now have another option at their disposal to enforce the law. … It won’t be just warnings coming from us. It could be summonses — citations to appear in court.”

Legalize it?

Jack Abbott’s Continuum Skateshop on Spring Street does a mix of business, serving those who skateboard just for fun and those who use the boards to get around.

“More and more people are using skateboards to get to class,” he said. “It’s a safe, green healthy form of transportation. It needs to be encouraged, especially the way gas prices are.”

Others are beginning to agree.

Charleston Moves, a nonprofit that advocates human-powered transportation, soon will discuss skateboarding in more depth, as the rise in skateboarding here has mirrored the rise in bicycle use, director Tom Bradford said.

“Personally, I just wonder how it can be outlawed,” Bradford said of skateboarding. “It’s clearly an idea whose time has come.”

Not everyone thinks so. Marvin Katzen drives his “Doin’ the Charleston” tour bus around city streets near the college and has had some ugly brushes with skateboarders, including some who have banged on his bus’ windows and made obscene gestures

“These skateboarders go whipping in and out of traffic, most of the time going the wrong way, particularly on St. Philip Street between Calhoun and Wentworth,” Katzen said. “It’s not a mode of transportation. It’s a toy. The skateboard doesn’t belong on the street.”

But McFadden said he tries to look out for his own safety — and that of others.

“The only type of accident I’ve had on the skateboard is when I hit a rock or didn’t know a curb was coming up,” he said. “I’m constantly looking behind me and in front of me to make sure I’m not hitting any cracks or any pedestrian walking toward me. I try to be conscious of that and respectable.”

If you have videos like this, send the links to me!

Thanks a ton to everyone who is using the park and making videos about it. Keep it up and send me your new cuts as you post them. I’ll put them up here on pour it now.com

February 22, 2011 Columbia Museum of Art 6pm – 8pm.

Here we go again! You all saw the video from last year’s Skate & Create reception. This year promises to be another banger. Don’t get left out. Bring your friends and family, come grab some refreshments, grab a beer from the bar, check the artwork, and chill with friends. We will be shooting another video so make sure you look fresh to deff.

Shannon Smith thinks Charleston is a pretty friendly city—unless you’re riding a skateboard. Then this place renowned for its politeness becomes considerably less hospitable. “Even growing up, when we were skating the George Street pool, there was bias against skaters,” says the 39-year-old Charleston native, now president of the local chapter of Pour It Now, a four-year-old skateboarding advocacy group that helps build skate parks around the state. Since joining the nonprofit, she’s seen dozens of facilities pop up across the Southeast, including in Columbia and Bluffton. Despite years of effort, however, Charleston still doesn’t have a major park to call its own. But in late March, the wheels of change were finally set in motion.

On March 29, the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission (CCPRC) voted unanimously to carve out $2 million for a new downtown skate park. To be located on undeveloped South Carolina Department of Transportation property under the Ravenel Bridge on Meeting Street, the park is currently slated as a state-of-the-art, 40,000-square-foot center with room for enough bowls, half-pipes, quarter-pipes, rails, vert ramps, and stair sets to accommodate the entire Lowcountry skating populous. “It’s a demographic we haven’t done much for,” says CCPRC executive director Tom O’Rourke, who’s been pushing for the project for the last eight months, even taking commissioners on a field trip to a Salt Lake City skate park during a recent national conference.

For Pour It Now, the budget approval is a huge jump in a campaign that hasn’t always been promising. The group first submitted plans for a park to the city more than three years ago, projecting a $1.5 million price tag for a 35,000-square-foot park and gearing up to raise the funds privately. When the city couldn’t help finance the project, Department of Recreation director Laurie Yarbrough and deputy director of parks operations Matt Compton contacted O’Rourke to see if the CCPRC wanted to get involved.

Both O’Rourke and Smith joke about the unlikely partnership. “It’s like skateboarders and government trying to get married,” he explains of the alley-oops that the process has taken. “I’m waiting for Tom to put a ring on my finger,” joked Smith before the meeting.

And O’Rourke has delivered the bling. He envisions the venue being more than a skate park, featuring amenities such as a climbing wall, a pro shop, concessions, and possibly even a connection to the city’s fishing pier on the other side of the bridge. He also talks of the park hosting regional and national skate events, drawing big names from across the globe. “This won’t be like anything anyone has seen in this area,” says O’Rourke. And he now has healthy funding to pull it off.

The park won’t be open anytime soon, though. CCPRC allocated the money in a July 2010 to July 2011 budget; once the funding becomes available, it may take more than a year to finalize design plans and begin construction. In the meantime, the commission will be securing permits and gathering public input on design and usage, including assistance from Pour It Now.

“We’re finally exhaling and feel like we’re passing our baby on to good hands,” Smith says. “They’ll make sure it’s top of the line. It will probably be the best in the country at the time it’s built.” And O’Rourke is happy that an underserved constituency has finally received some long-coming attention. “There are a lot of winners in this,” he says.