Skate Park Protest Sparks Dialogue

It started as a protest. It ended with both sides talking, and hearing each other out, about a controversial new skate park proposed for Scantlebury Park and Yale’s future role in the neighborhood.

That rally-turned-dialogue took place in the golden hours of Friday afternoon in the Dixwell park bounded by Bristol Street, Ashmun Street, Webster Street, and the Farmington Canal Trail.

Before a backdrop of kids playing on the park’s jungle gym and splash pad, around 30 neighbors and anti-gentrification protesters associated with the Room for All coalition spoke out against two major upcoming initiatives slated to affect the Dixwell neighborhood.

The first was over the city’s planned rezoning of parts of Dixwell Avenue to be one of the three pilot Commercial Gateway Districts, along with portions of Whalley Avenue and Grand Avenue.

The proposed rezoning, per past city pitches, would implement parking maximums, increase the baseline Floor Area Ratio (FAR) for new buildings, and require 10 percent of new apartments to be set aside at affordable rental rates as a means of encouraging denser commercial and residential development along the avenues connecting downtown with the city’s neighborhoods.

The protesters called out the proposed rezoning, which is scheduled to be the subject of a public hearing at the City Plan Commission’s meeting this Wednesday, as bringing taller buildings, more commercial businesses, more traffic and noise and higher-income renters that might ultimately price out Dixwell’s primarily working class, black and brown populations.

Click here, here, here, and here for more on the proposed rezoning. Click here or watch the video at the bottom of this article for the protesters’ full remarks on the planned rezoning.

The second subject of the protest was more directly related to the location of Friday’s event: a new skate park, funded in part by the Could Be Fund, Yale’s Schwarzman Center, and the city’s parks department, slated to be built in the center of Scantlebury Park.

The protesters described the skate park project as unasked for and unwanted by the community, despite having the local alder’s support.

“Dixwell residents have repeatedly asked for basic amenities and refurbishments to park facilities,” longtime Gibbs Street resident Joy Dunston read in a prepared statement, ​“including benches for parents to use near the splash pad and more trash cans.

“Instead of seeking funds to address these issues, the Board of Alders accepted money from the Schwarzman Center at Yale and the Could Be Fund to build a concrete skate board stage that will take away green space from Dixwell families and increase traffic, parking, noise, and safety concerns.”

The protesters criticized the park as nothing more than a ​“Yale land grab” designed to push student skaters out of Beinecke Plaza and into a partially Yale-funded project in a community park that, they said, many residents didn’t learn about until the 13th hour.

Skate park critics weren’t the only attendees at Friday’s protest.

Also in the crowd were Steve Roberts and J. Joseph: the two young local men who conceived of the Scantlebury skate park idea in the first place, and who have been its primary backers.

After the protesters had put down their signs and their microphone and started to disperse, Roberts and Joseph engaged a small group near the edge of the crowd.

“I Feel This From Both Sides”

Roberts wrote down his phone number and email address and passed it to an attendee. And the two local skaters started doing what the protesters had accused them of not doing enough of during the project’s gestation over the past two months: They spoke face to face with neighborhood critics.

“I feel this from both sides,” Roberts said. He lives in the neighborhood himself, on Gibbs Street. He hears the noise from the frequent parties and family reunions that take place late into the night on Scantlebury Park. He’s sensitive to not wanting to bringing in a new bit of infrastructure that will only exacerbate the current level of loud noises emanating from the park.

On the other hand, he said, the intention behind this skate park is not to gentrify. It comes more from his wanting to give the 10 to 12 year-old Dixwell kids he teaches how to skateboard through the ​“Push to Start” program at Stetson Library a place in the neighborhood for them to practice their moves, build a sense of community, and learn from and interact with skaters from throughout the city.

“Come out and see how excited these kids are about skateboarding,” he implored the group. This project will be for Dixwell, he said, as much as it will be for anyone else in New Haven.

What about the other skaters this park is bound to attract? asked Dixwell resident Adair Franklin. If Yalies or skaters who otherwise might use the Edgewood Skate Park start coming to Scantlebury instead, they might treat this neighborhood park as just a place to practice tricks, dump trash, blast music, and then move on back to wherever they live in the city, Franklin argued.

“They come over here and they may not respect the space as much as you do,” she said.

That’s why establishing a set of norms and rules for the new skate park will be so important, Roberts said. The park’s backers have to set a tone of ​“Cut the nonsense,” he said.

That said, he would much rather see people skateboarding in Scantlebury Park than riding dirt bikes up and down Dixwell Avenue, or getting into some other kind of trouble. ​“I had a friend who died in a dirt bike accident on Sherman Avenue,” he said. ​“If we could get the kids into something like skateboarding,” they may not turn to more dangerous activities.

As for Yale’s investment in the project, he said, ​“it’s satisfying to me to see Yale make the effort to deal with the problem” of the town-gown divide by putting money into a skate park that will not just benefit Yale students.

“Is it really for the neighborhood?” fellow Dixwell neighbor Lillie Chambers asked. ​“Or is it for people from outside” the neighborhood?

The answer, Roberts said, is both.

“We want everyone in our neighborhood to be around thinkers, creatives, artists,” he said. He said that, when he was 15 years old, he started hanging out at Lou Cox’s Channel 1 skate shop downtown. He met artists, skaters, filmmakers, and other creative people who turned him on to the skateboarding in the first place. ​“It changed the way I think,” he said.

Skateboarding encourages young people to put their phones down and engage in an outdoor activity in a group setting, he said. It builds character, community, athleticism, creativity.

“Believe it or not,” Chambers said, ​“I used to skateboard myself. I was one of the first women in Dixwell skateboarding.”

Kerry Ellington, a community organizer for the New Haven Legal Assistance Association and one of the leaders of the Room for All coalition, said that the protesters on Friday have nothing against skateboarding in and of itself. They just feel that this particular project is inappropriate for this particular park.

“This is a deeper, political issue,” she said. ​“This is about whose park this is.” Even if the skate park will ultimately be city-owned property, it’s being funded in large part by Yale. And anytime Yale gives money to some cause, she said, it usually expects some level of de facto ownership. ​“Whose interests are we serving here? The residents didn’t ask for this.”

The more black and brown youth in this city see themselves as skaters, Roberts responded, the more that Dixwell as a neighborhood will feel that ownership over the skate park in Scantlebury. Partnering with Yale and leveraging the university’s resources is one avenue to up that diversity in the skateboarding community, he said.

“But at what cost?” Chambers asked. More Yale students in the park might mean more Yale police in the park. And that could lead to more tense police-community interactions, like the Hamden and Yale officer-involved shooting in Dixwell earlier this spring.

“Can this skate park live somewhere else?” Ellington asked. Does it have to go right in the middle of Dixwell’s neighborhood park?

Roberts and Joseph said they would still like to see the skate park go into Scantlebury. Now that the alders have voted to allow the city to accept $50,000 from the Could Be Fund and $25,000 from the Schwarzman Center to build the park, the two skaters are planning to meet with the city’s new landscape architect to talk about early stage designs.

They’re also planning on reaching out to the community, they said, to talk with neighbors about what specifically they would like the skate park to look like. They will be attending a Parks Commission meeting at the parks department’s Edgewood Avenue headquarters on Wednesday evening to talk about the project.

“The emotional impact is what it is,” said local musician Paul Bryant Hudson. He said that the skate park, the planned commercial corridor rezoning, the Winchester Lofts and 201 Munson apartment projects and the NXTHVN art studios have all struck him as of a piece: Foisted on Dixwell with minimal community engagement.

“The way these conversations have been conducted have been eerily similar,” he said.

Roberts and Joseph didn’t pledge to move the skate park elsewhere. Ellington, Chambers, and Franklin promised that they would keep showing up to public conversations about the park to voice their concerns and call for it to be moved.

But the two sides were listening to each other.

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch the full protest.