Happy Valley skatepark close to becoming reality

A renowned design firm is working on plans for a new park at 162nd Avenue

By Matthew Graham

The Clackamas Review, Apr 14, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

ADVERTISEMENTS

With a world-class skate park design firm and support from local skateboard shops, an innovative Happy Valley skate park is starting to take shape as part of the larger community park at 162nd Avenue.

Katie Dunham, a planner with the North Clackamas Parks and Recreation District, said that during the early planning stages of the park as a whole, a lot of community members came asking for a skatepark.

“There’s a lot of great benefits” to having a skatepark, Dunham said. “One of them is keeping kids outdoors and having a place where they can skate safely and enjoy an unstructured recreational activity. It also plays well with the rest of the concept plan for the community park.”

She said families will be able to come and, while one may be playing softball, another can skate at the park.

NCPRD hired Newline Skateparks Inc., a Canadian-based company that has built over 100 parks throughout the U.S., Canada, and in Chile, Sweden and Taiwan.

“The skateboarders were looking for something unique, something that we would call a plaza-based development, so they were hoping for something that resembled an urban plaza,” said Newline President Kyle Dion. “We design it as an urban space first of all and then we kind of make it skateable. So we use a lot of the principals of designing any space, and then go about adding features and adding elements and detailing that would just be conducive to skateboarding.”

The specific design for the Happy Valley park started with an interesting concept.

“We mimicked it after the concept of raindrops in a pond so that the main sort of shape is sort of these five circles and then there’s a fun track which is like a big looping track around the outside,” Dion said.

1 | 2 Next Page >>