This Bike and Skate Park was constructed in 2005 to great local fan-fair after many donations from various source, including a $5,000 donation from Tony Hawke himself! I was able to locate an article from the
Park puts Madras on map
Bike, skatepark draws people from all over
MADRAS - Thor Janda is an unlikely skateboard enthusiast.
At 260 pounds and 42 years of age, he stands out among the kids at Madras Bike and Skatepark like a buoy in the desert.
”I'm an old, large man who's starting to break down,” said Janda, a mortgage loan officer from Vancouver, Wash. Janda has suffered two arm fractures since resuming his old childhood pastime. ”I just go into the bowl now and flow around,” he said. ”It's like an endless run with no tricks.”
Local skaters hardly pause to take in the sight of Janda fastening wrist protectors and slowly dropping in.
His size and style of dress might be a little unusual, but kids who use the year-old Madras skatepark regularly have seen it all.
”You never know who's gonna show up,” said Ryan Zistel, 21. ”People come from really long distances just to skate this park.”
The company behind the park's design and construction is part of the attraction. Dreamland Skateparks of Lincoln City has been responsible for more than 40 public skateparks in eight states, as well as in the United Kingdom, Italy and Austria.
Janda is a fan of Dreamland parks, and he makes it a point of traveling regularly to the company's other parks in the region. He recently visited parks in Idaho, and he is planning a skate trip to Montana.
”Everything they've ever built is the best,” said Ian King, 24, who grew up in Bend and now lives in Lincoln City. King made his first pilgrimage to the Madras park a few weeks after it was completed in October 2005, and has been back about 10 times since.
He's also a fan of the Redmond Skatepark - another Dreamland creation.
”The reason nobody goes to the Bend park,” he said, ”is that the people who designed it didn't ride a skateboard.”
Dreamland has cache that few skatepark companies enjoy because its founders were among the instigators of Burnside Bridge, a legendary Portland skate spot. The now-famous park got its start in 1990 when a group of skaters took over an area favored by junkies and the homeless. Working mostly under cover of darkness with found and donated materials, they erected a series of ramps and transitional features to accommodate their skating habits.
The skaters, once derided by city authorities as punks and troublemakers, became local heroes among business owners who saw crime in the area drop as the park developed.
The Madras skatepark has its own Cinderella story.
In 2000, a group of Madras parents and their skateboard-crazed children banded together with a young Madras wife and her skateboard-and BMX-obsessed husband. They dreamed of having their very own park that would accommodate trick cyclists and skateboarders.
When approached with the concept for a skate and bike park, Madras City Council members said their cupboard was bare. But they donated an empty lot in a low-income neighborhood on the far west end of town and gave the group their blessing.
A seemingly endless series of car washes, can drives, raffles, and pizza and bake sales followed. The young wife, Melanie Widmer - now a city councilor - and her husband, Sid Widmer - now owner of a skate-and-bike shop in town - watched as Madras' skate gremmies grew into teenagers. Some moved away.
But the core group kept at their goal of getting a modestly sized, well-designed skatepark for the city, in spite of Dreamland's $224,000 price tag.
It seemed like so much money, and keeping the momentum going was hard, said Melanie Widmer.
But just as their cause began to truly seem like a pipe dream, grant money and financial donations began to flow. The Bean Foundation, a local philanthropy organization, donated $20,000. The Meier Memorial Trust donated $50,000, as did the Ford Family Foundation; and there were others. The Widmers and their band of hard-core bike and skate families were finally in business.
The 1-acre park, now home on dry afternoons to any number of novice and intermediate local skaters and BMX-ers, features two bowls, dug out areas of concrete with long waves and curves along the walls. One is relatively shallow; the other is deeper and more challenging.
”There is no flat bottom on the bigger bowl,” said Chad Balcom, 29, who came from Portland on a recent Saturday to see and skate the Madras park. ”That's unique. And the little mini-ramp area, you can tell they built that for the less experienced riders.”
Balcom, a machinist by trade, serves on the board of directors for Skaters for Public Skateparks, a nonprofit group that helps promote projects like the Widmers'. He said he likes the fact that Madras built its skatepark near apartments and a main road.
You want the park to be visible, he said. Otherwise, he explained, you get a self-fulfilling prophecy: Regard skaters as punks and put them out of sight, and lo and behold, they will get into trouble. You don't want a concentration of unsupervised, unwatched adolescents, he said.
The city of Madras, which adopted the park and now takes responsibility for its maintenance, plans to begin improvements in the late winter or early spring. Those include lighting, bathrooms, landscaping and, possibly, a security camera to discourage vandalism.
City Administrator Mike Morgan said he is hoping Madras can begin expanding the park sometime in the next couple of years. Dreamland has already been consulted about adding new vertical features and other elements to the park, which will double in size.
Dreamland's staff members did not return phone calls and could not be tracked down for this article.
They're definitely artists, Balcom said, and hard to pin down sometimes.
Initially, Dreamland designers balked at the idea of incorporating bike use into the Madras plan, according to the Widmers. Two-wheelers, and the deck-and-truck set, are known to run in very different circles.
”During the '80s, we all rode together,” said Sid Widmer of the divide between skate and BMX subcultures. ”But now, there's this made-up conflict between them.”
Madras doesn't figure into that, he said. Lots of bikers here skate, and vice versa.
Dreamland ultimately complied with the Widmers' wishes, making Madras's their first deliberately bike-friendly skatepark.
”People are coming out of the woodwork here to use it,” said Zistel, who sells skateboards, bikes and component parts at Sid Widmer's store. ”We have no theater here, we have no shopping mall here, he said, but now, here's something kids can go out and do.”
Between the park's opening and now, Zistel said, many of Madras's young residents have taken up BMX and skateboarding for the first time.
”Last year those little dudes were just hopping on curbs,” he said. ”Now they're really getting good. We've got kids here that definitely rip.”
Zistel, a Madras native who has skated since he was 12, said he used to have to travel elsewhere to find a decent place to ride.
”But now we have our own skatepark here in our very own town, and people (from elsewhere) are coming here to use it,” he said. ”That's still kind of a shock.”