ARLINGTON — Relief is on the way for the city’s skateboard-scraped curbs, stairs and handrails.
The city has a preliminary design for a new 7,000-square-foot skate park to be built at Bill Quake Memorial Park on the corner of 188th Street NE and 59th Avenue NE.
Construction could begin this spring, said Sarah Hegge, Arlington’s recreation coordinator.
The designers from Grindline Skateparks, Inc. of Seattle aimed at skaters of various skill levels, but they threw in a bone or two for the area’s boldest gravity-stretchers.
The 16-foot full pipe capsule should draw a lot of attention. Matt Fluegge, a project engineer at Grindline, said Arlington will have what he thinks is the first full-pipe capsule in the state.
Shaped like the top half of a cold-medicine capsule and made of concrete, the full pipe’s opening will face south to catch the most daylight.
The full pipe will be the centerpiece of a multicurved bowl. Some of the bowl’s depressions will drop as deep as 12 feet.
But Grindline also catered heavily to the increasingly popular street skating style. The new park will offer a variety of stairs, ledges and rails, including a more tricky "double-kinked" rail.
"The trend in skate parks is leaning toward emulating what you see in the street or downtown," Fluegge said.
A few years ago, when the city’s parks board members started studying what works and what doesn’t at municipal skate parks, they found that the parks that were used the most usually had input from actual skaters during the design.
Fluegge agreed, noting that everybody at Grindline skates at parks. The company has experience building skate parks all over the country.
"The big problem in every area is just parks being designed and/or built by people that don’t skateboard," he said. "That seems to be the root of all evil in skate parks."
The City Council eventually settled on the Quake Field site after neighbors near the original site in Jensen Park objected.
"It’s nice and centrally located between Smokey Point and Arlington and close to the Freshmen Academy and the Boys and Girls Club," Hegge said.
The park will have signs warning skaters they are at their own risk. It will not be supervised, but city workers will maintain it. The skate park will be open during the day, with fences closing it at night.
Fluegge said the project should take about three months once construction starts, if weather is good.
The cost is estimated at $232,584. The city has budgeted $180,000 and is waiting to hear about a $114,000 state grant that will be announced in April.
"We’ll still be starting with or without the grant," Hegge said, indicating that the city would look for other funds to finish the project if the grant falls through.
Reporter Scott Morris: 425-339-3292 or smorris@heraldnet.com.
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