When there isn’t snow on the ground, 36-year-old Gordon Hendrick grinds rails and kickflips his way through a defunct tennis court on the Mohawk Riverbank that has been converted into a skatepark.
Scattered about the park are homemade obstacles like rails, ramps and ledges.
While walking around the court, Hendrick said the origins of the park’s first obstacle — a cinderblock ledge — is unknown and isn’t quite sure who put it there.
“It’s a mystery, we think it might be this guy Ben, and he’s sort of a generation above me, but we are not entirely sure,” Hendrick said.
Hendrick says a group of about 10 skaters have been intermittently adding homemade obstacles to the park that first became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Five or six people would come here pretty regularly and then, so that was like 2020, 2021, maybe and then 2021, it got kind of popular, about 20 people, and we just started adding small stuff,” Hendrick said.
Hendrick says the park has been increasingly popular over the years and has attracted skaters from neighboring municipalities like Clifton Park in Saratoga County.
“There’s been over 100 people here before,” Hendrick said.
While “The Riverside Skatepark” is not sanctioned by the city of Schenectady and “no trespassing” signs surround its perimeter, Councilor Carl Williams is seeking to officially designate it as a city-supported skatepark.
But before that can happen, Williams said the park needs to be brought up to code for liability reasons.
“In its current condition, it is something that the city cannot openly endorse,” Williams said.
To upgrade the park to confirm with city code, the city needs money.
That’s why Williams sought help from 111th District State Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara to secure funding.
“These types of ventures can be far reaching, like upwards of a million dollars, I’m confident in what Assemblyman Santabarbara has done previously for the Ccty of Schenectady and in our conversations, he feels like he can get a significant amount of funding to at least get the project funded,” Williams said.
Santabarbara supports the city’s efforts to make improvements to the park but said securing funding is still in the beginning stages.
“There are improvements that are needed there, it is a park that could use some investment and to bring it up to date, up to current standards,” Santabarbara said.
Some neighbors living in the surrounding area have also supported the skatepark.
Earlier this month, Katherine Stephens, president of a local neighborhood group known as The Stockade Association, sent a letter to the City Council expressing her support for the skatepark.
“That was a disused tennis court for many years, it was just under deterioration, people could not really play on it and then when the skatepark arrived, a makeshift DIY skatepark, it brought new life into this park in a place that otherwise had no life in it,” Stephens said.
And, at last week’s City Council meeting, members passed a resolution unanimously supporting the funding of the skatepark.
Hendrick says he has been waiting a long time for the funding, but at the same time hopes the park does not become overdeveloped.
“I don’t think anybody that skates here wants it to be sort of like a big, big huge thing, you know what I mean. Like in all other American cities, especially in Europe there is all these spaces that are sort of more designed to be integrated in the park spaces and the city spaces, it’s not an alienated space with huge ramps and stuff its more like smaller stuff, ledges, that’s what skaters want,” Hendrick said.
