Photo by Dallas Currie
Elliot Skate Plaza
In the heart of downtown Minneapolis, Elliot Skate Plaza is a custom-designed skate park—the same firm created the park at the Tokyo Olympics.
It’s the first sunny day in May, and the exuberant brass of Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up” mingles with the scrapes, whooshes, and thwaps of skateboards doing their thing at Elliot Skate Plaza. Teens and adults and a knee-padded kid perch on the ramps. The brave drop in, glide across the buttery pavement, and hop deftly onto the rails to grind.
If you couldn’t see the downtown Minneapolis skyline in the background, you’d swear you were in Southern California. And, in a way, you are. Elliot Skate Plaza was designed by Upland, California–based California Skateparks, the same firm that did the park at the Tokyo Olympics. I’m here to speak with Witt Siasoco and Paul Forsline, co-founders of nonprofit advocacy group City of Skate. The organization was instrumental in getting Elliot Skate Plaza built in 2021, and it’s now equally determined to secure $15 million in state funds—60 times Minnesota’s current allotment—to create similar skate parks across the state.
Forsline’s dressed in a button-down and slacks—he’s not a skater, but his kids are. Last summer, he was here at the park for every concrete pour. With a price tag of more than $700,000, Elliot Skate Plaza has quickly become a center of orbit for the Twin Cities skate scene. Minnesota has a thriving skate community, says Forsline, but it’s bottlenecked into a handful of parks, DIY nooks and crannies, and private-keyholder ramps.
“It’s like how we always had a good bike culture here—people weren’t building bike lanes and bike trails, but eventually they did,” says Forsline. “Or like people not recognizing how much of, like, a rock-’n’-roll city this was for years. But there was Prince right in your backyard, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Semisonic. It’s always been here, but never recognized. I view the skate scene as kind of the same thing.”
Today, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board’s master plan includes more than 20 approved skate parks—the trick is getting them funded. And City of Skate’s latest big project, the $15 million Minnesota State Skate Park Grant bill, would do just that, and at a statewide scale. The idea, Forsline says, is to model skate park funding after the Minnesota Amateur Sports Commission’s “Mighty Ducks” program, which annually helps towns across the state pay for hockey rink maintenance. To build skate parks, communities would have to come up with matching funds from local government, charitable organizations, and businesses.
City of Skate first pushed for $8 million in 2017—by 2020, the state created a grant program, but only funded it at $250,000. That’s a fraction of the cost of Elliot Skate Plaza, Forsline points out. Meanwhile, the nonprofit is at work designing skate parks around the city, from Central Elementary (themed paisley and purple for Prince) to an all-wheel model that welcomes roller skates and blades, bikes, and scooters at Folwell Park. To help pay for it all, it’s also pursuing funding from other sources, like Tony Hawk’s nonprofit The Skatepark Project.
When I’m done chatting with Forsline, I catch Siasoco taking a breather—he’s been on the ramps and rails with the kids. A community-based artist, lately he’s been building a custom concrete skate park in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, working with some teen skaters who are dealing with the recent death of their friend.
“Mental health in rural communities for youth is just as vital as it is in the city,” says Siasoco. “All kids need programming and attention and a space where they can do that safely.”
Siasoco was a key player in getting a skate park built at Juxtaposition Arts in north Minneapolis in 2019. He tried to partner with the U of M to do a health assessment of the park’s impact. What metric would you use, he wonders—diabetes? Turns out robust studies about skate parks are rare. Those that do exist, however, suggest that despite connotations of urban decay, skate parks do wonders for youth health and development.
Anecdotally, if Elliot Skate Plaza and the Juxtaposition park are any indication, the evidence is clear. Willy Ndemo Mogoa (18) and Dennis Anderson (22), from the Northside and Southside respectively, hop off the cement to chat. I sit on Ndemo Mogoa’s board as they tell me what the scene is to them: a place where they’ve found creativity and self-expression and built confidence. But the best part by far, they emphasize, is the friendships.
“I latch onto skateboarding as a filler for therapy,” says Ndemo Mogoa. “Any skate park is my safe place. If I needed emotional support, the first place I would go is a skate park. I wouldn’t even call up one of my exes. I’d be like, ‘Yo, Chavez, bro, I need a hug right now. I need some support.’ I know my homies will have my back.”
Ndemo Mogoa started skating four years ago but says he’s wanted to learn since he was a kid but that there were no parks nearby and no skate shops—so he played Tony Hawk’s video games instead, until the summer Juxtaposition’s park was built. That, says Forsline, is exactly the access City of Skate is fighting for.
“It’s a state, national, international thing that communities rarely value skate parks,” says Forsline. “They try to push them away. The skateboarders still survive, because that’s their spirit. But if you don’t have spaces like this, there’s a whole bunch of kids like Willy. There’s a million of them we’ve already missed.”
As Forsline finishes his thought, the sounds of the park pull us back in—this time, it’s the hearty rasp of James Brown singing “The Boss.” There’s a thwack behind us as Ndemo Mogoa and his crew glide away down 8th Street and wave goodbye to us and the park, where they’re sure to be back tomorrow.
