The sun hangs high over the horizon on a recent summer morning at McIntire Park, and Stephen Delli Priscoli is trying to defy gravity.
A slight pivot of the legs, a subtle manipulation of friction. It’s not hard to imagine Isaac Newton discussing the forces that pull a skater down to his board. Delli Priscoli jumps, twists, and lands the trick, called a tre flip because of the board’s three consecutive rotations.
He grins. “I’ve been working on that all week.”
Joined by a handful of other skateboarders at the Charlottesville Skate Park at 8 in the morning, Delli Priscoli is part of a wave of skaters who, fueled by an amalgamation of factors including the COVID-19 pandemic, construction of the $2 million skate park, and increased visibility from competitions like the Olympics and X-Games, are creating a thriving skateboarding culture in the city.
Driven stir-crazy by school and workplace closures during the pandemic, many people picked up new outdoor activities, including skateboarding. Skateboarders in the city cut across demographic groups: On any given day at the park you’re likely to see teenagers, graying adults, parents and children, and young professionals riding skateboards or BMX bikes across the park’s obstacles.
Charlottesville provides unique incentives for interested skaters, including the skate park. Opened in 2019, the park is a social and economic engine that draws skaters from across the East Coast, says Matt Moffett, manager of the city park. In addition to being a co-owner of Cville Skates, Moffett was a professional skateboarder for almost 20 years.
Construction of the skate park itself isn’t the only way the city is subsidizing the sport. Moffett reckons he is one of a few skate park managers in the country. In addition to funding his position, which falls under the Parks & Recreation Department, the city employs maintenance staff to keep the skate park meticulously clean. Graffiti at this skate park? Nope.
“It would be in shambles if not for that,” the manager says. “There’s damage in skate parks. That’s just the nature of them.”
The skate park’s vision, and the current skating renaissance, has been decades in the making.
Duane Brown, a Charlottesville skating activist, began petitioning the city for a skate park in the 1970s. As a child, Brown would travel to the skate park in Richmond as often as possible. Eventually, at the behest of a mentor, Brown joined a bid to petition the city for construction of a hybrid private-public skate park.
“My first experience of City Council—I was 14 or something,” Brown says. “[We] got completely shot down.”
It was the first, but not the last, of Brown’s efforts. In the late ’90s, a successful push by skating activist Daria Brezinski secured a space for skateboarders in the unused and dilapidated tennis courts nestled beside the Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad on McIntire Road.
Downsides of the new location included its proximity to a creek, which would often flood the courts, plus two-inch wide cracks that dotted the ground, Brown says. Undeterred, skateboarders found ways around the haphazard environment.
“We’d find an old handrail somewhere that wasn’t being used and, like, literally hammer it into those cracks and use that as a rail to skate on,” Brown says. “The odd thing was, every now and then I guess, the city would get a little freaked out about the things that we built, and they would come out and take it all away. But they still allowed us to skate there.”
One feature of the old skate park involved a “really big ramp” that Brown built on behalf of Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, who came to University Hall in 1998 to host a crusade, or fundamentalist preaching event. To appeal to the young crowds at the university, Graham flew in a professional skateboarder-turned-preacher. Graham also asked Brown to build a skateboard ramp. After the event ended, he told Brown he could keep the ramp. Brown called the former Parks & Recreation director, Johnny Ellen, and said he would donate the ramp to the city if it promised not to tow it away. Ellen agreed, but wanted to take a look first.
“I’ll never forget, I saw him walking to it and his face lit up,” Brown says. “He was like really stoked about the whole thing from the very start. So that kind of legitimized the whole endeavor, once we had that big ramp there.”
The tennis court arrangement lasted about eight years before construction on the 250 bypass forced the courts to shut down. With no dedicated place to skate, Brown reinvigorated his activism, forming a volunteer skate park committee, with the goal of keeping in close contact with the city’s Parks & Rec officials. In addition to educating local government leaders about skateboarding, the committee gave input on the design of a potential new park.
The temporary skate park would move one more time, to the parking lot of the former golf course at McIntire Park, before plans for a permanent skate park moved forward. Years passed as budget and approval processes hit snags. The skating community wavered. “We are losing skaters,” a facilities manager told The Daily Progress in 2016.
With some grant funding from the Tony Hawk Foundation, a final budget was drawn up, and construction for the park moved forward. The two-acre park opened in April 2019, and features two layers of skating areas, including rails, stairs, and deep bowls built by Dreamland Skateparks.
“Those guys are, in my opinion, one of the best skate park builders out there,” Moffett says.
The skate park opening also included the reveal of a bicycle and pedestrian bridge, which had long been in development. The final product connected the skate park to a small parking lot and the Brooks Family YMCA.
But the skate park ran over budget and the city had to scrap plans to include flood lights. Eventually, the skateboarding community raised the money to install the flood lights themselves.
Now, skateboarders can enjoy the park during daylight and twilight hours. The city also promotes the sport by offering private skateboarding lessons and hosting summer skating camps for young children and teens. On a typical summer week, Alex Mikes, a camp volunteer and skate park committee member, says the camps can cater to around 20 to 30 kids on weekday mornings, and provide a relatively affordable way for young skateboarders to enter the sport. Camp participants have a “huge range of abilities,” Mikes says. For campgoers who are too young to mount a board, Mikes gives them water guns and balloons.
Together, the skate park and summer camps have generated skating enthusiasm and spawned a new generation of young Charlottesville skateboarders, many of whom frequented the park during the coronavirus pandemic, when schools pivoted to virtual learning. (The skate park was so busy during 2020 that the city threatened to shut it down to avoid transmission of the virus, but skaters successfully lobbied to keep it open.)
“Even 20 years ago, it’s crazy how much better they are,” Mikes says of the current skateboarding generation. “They’re born skating here. People just keep getting better.”
One up-and-comer, 13-year old Hunter Bougis, started skating when he was 4. On a typical afternoon, he can be spotted in the park bowls, occasionally making videos or commenting on those taken by other skaters. In one video shot, Bougis jumps on a ledge, as a Jay Love song plays in the background.
Another skateboarder, Zephyr Chatowsky, the 12-year-old daughter of Moffett, recalls heading to the park with a group of friends and occasionally tuning into online school directly from the park during the pandemic.
“I started doing it more because there wasn’t much to do,” she says.
Zephyr is among a growing group of girls who entered the sport over the last few years, says Jeneene Chatowsky, Zephyr’s mother and co-owner of Cville Skates.
The local skateboarding scene differs from Florida and Rhode Island, where Chatowsky grew up skateboarding, and where she would sometimes be one of a few female skateboarders in the area.
“Now to see these girls ripping in the Olympics, I think there was a lot of work to lead to this,” Chatowsky says.
Located in McIntire Plaza, Cville Skates grew out of a project that Chatowsky completed for her master’s degree, when she was required to create a brand. The shop originally started as an online platform before securing its first physical location inside a building co-occupied by High Tor Gear Exchange, an outdoor gear and clothing consignment store. Eventually, Cville Skates moved into a different space, behind High Tor.
Chatowsky and Moffett imagine Cville Skates as a community hub for a growing group of skateboarders. Besides selling boards and merchandise, the shop hosts art shows with local high schools and has rotating music shows for underground bands in Charlottesville.
In addition to more girls, Chatowsky sees more parents interested in skating, and credits that to Charlottesville’s family-friendly culture.
“To see more moms out there skating with their kids,” Chatowsky says. “That’s pretty powerful.”
Cinema Skateshop, located on the Downtown Mall, is another community center for skateboarders. The shop’s owner, Louis Handler, has been making skating videos since he was a teenager, and a reel of videos plays on a widescreen TV inside the store. Handler grew up in town and remembers the McIntire tennis courts. He thinks the skate park’s construction was inevitable given the interest from the skateboarding community.
Handler still makes videos, showcasing some skateboarders on Cinema’s Instagram. In them, an eagle-eyed viewer can spot a few Charlottesville landmarks. Along with skateboards, the shop also sells skating apparel and caters to the community’s interest in fashion and art.
Cinema’s clients also include street skaters, who focus on grinds and flat-ground tricks on the built urban environments beyond the skate park. Even though the skate park is open, street skating still draws plenty of skateboarders. Charlottesville’s downtown layout and preference for colonial architecture make the area attractive to street skaters, Handler says.
“The brick feels cool, there are good places to skate aesthetically,” he says.
Brown himself is no stranger to street skating. Before the skate park was built, he used to skate in a drainage ditch by a parking lot near University Hall, and he sought out cement formations around town that provided a good riding surface.
As they rise and decline in popularity, features from skating’s stylistic offshoots—bowl, street, and ramp skating—appear in modern skate parks, according to Brown.
Back at the Charlottesville Skate Park, a group of skateboarders including Delli Priscoli, Mikes, and Bougis stand in a single-file line, gearing up to tackle one of those features. The sky is clear, and after a rest for Gatorade, they push off and fly.
