Thursday, December 11, 2014

Checking Out the New Grant Park Skate Park

Continuing our civic project week, we thought we would revisit the recently opened Grant Park Skate Park.  As you may have read, the new Grant Park Skate Park officially opened this past Saturday (12/6).

While the neighborhood sentiment seems to be mixed, we here at Sloopin thought it was a nice addition but were slightly curious to see if/how many people would use it.

As a result, we went by on Sunday (the day after it was officially open) to check out the scene and this is what we found:
Frankly we were pretty surprised to see so many people out there and the level of skill involved.  We assume the good turnout is because it was the second day the park was open, but nonetheless still pretty impressive.
  
Beyond that the other big question that stood out after watching this for a little bit was who is liable if someone gets hurt here.  We assume there is precedent for things/places like this, but it seems like someone is definitely going to get seriously hurt out here (OK, clearly I'm not a skater and clearly I'm old, but damn this looks dangerous). 
Anyway, after pondering this for a minute we headed to the entrance and found the "rules":
I guess that's enough coverage for the city to prevent liability?  Also, we didn't look that hard, but definitely didn't see many people with helmets on.  To each their own...
Anyway, it's also probably worth posting this entertaining video that was professionally produced for the opening of the park:
Yay for tricks!  Yay for drone camera's providing fun ariel videos!  and yay for young people doing fun and dangerous stuff for our viewing pleasure!  

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