Here's Danville skatepark, as it sat on my 2008 Tour. It was a nice facility. Mostly prefabricated concrete obstacles, well-laid-out, on a wide-open, smooth concrete surface. Pretty clean, pretty tidy, and with some fun, mellow banks at the gate entrance. Well, that was then. And, this is now:
Saturday, March 27th, 2010, 6:30 am. The skatepark is still there, and entirely intact [contrary to popular opinion/the rumor mill]. However: The front gate is chained and padlocked shut, and there are fancy, routered "closed" signs at the entrance. The rationale? Apparently, the Danville Police were getting way, waaayyy too many calls to the skatepark to break up "violence" [teenage drama bullshit, probably].
This is what happens when:
1. There's no coherent and/or organized skate scene in town,
2. Kids are too stupid to appreciate what they've got, and too lazy to take care of it accordingly,
3. Kids take the "let somebody else manage this shit" attitude, and fail to manage [police] their own damn selves, and
4.The powers-that-be are too overzealous in "taking away" a great investment that's already been put there, and at great taxpayer expense. Apparently, the cops don't realize that this isn't gonna "solve" the problem at all. It's just gonna "move" the problem somewhere else, whilst leaving a town-full of skaters with nowhere to go, and nothing to do. And, we all know what idle hands do, people...
Note that I used "taking away" in quotes up there. For my part, I'm sort of amazed and perplexed that some genius kids in Danville haven't invested in a pair of bolt-cutters or tin snips, and "rectified" this chain-link fence/chain-and-padlock-gated "situation" yet. Once again, we have kids being too dumb and/or lazy, to take fate/destiny/initiative/whatever into their own hands. Whaddya expect, everyone to hand you everything on a silver platter or for the rest of your fucking lives?! C'mon, man. Get real, guys, and get on that shit.
