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Highlands Today

Skateboarders Use Downtown Parking Lots

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By Douglas  Carman | Highlands Today

Published: November 12, 2007

AVON PARK — Brad Cain said he teaches some of his friends their skateboarding tricks, but neither he nor his friends bother with the skateboard park near the middle school.

Instead, Cain and his posse go out on the parking lots, grinding along the curbs by the First Baptist Church, moving down the sidewalks on Main Street and, until one of his friends got arrested for it, taking the covered lot of Audio Options.

Why not the park? "It's crap. We need a different one," he said. "It's better for bicycles."

As he and his friends hit the parking lot, the skateboard park lies in near-abandon. The concrete half-pipes, the rail and the ramps are cracked and covered in graffiti. Near one of the ramps, a loose set of concrete blocks form a makeshift set of steps. Scattered, shattered concrete littered the half-pipe Thursday afternoon.

This park, Avon Park Police Department Comdr. Michael Rowan said, is the one his officers tell the skateboarders to go to when they're caught trespassing on the downtown parking lots. Public Works Coordinator Ted Long could not be reached Thursday for comment.

Dennis Fox, a screen printer at the Designers Top Shop next to the park, said on the rare times the park is used, it's usually not used by skateboarders but by kids just hanging out over near the dilapidated half-pipe.

A worker at the Bagwell building across from that park suspected the loose blocks were stolen from one of the pallets left in the back of the building. Another set of slabs, positioned on the lot to create a loose ramp, supported his hunch.

Business Relations

Almost every business with a parking lot dealt with them before, though their concern varied.

Rowan, reached last week, said the police department picked up about 10 complaints from businesses and passersby about skateboarders zipping over the business parking lots. He said it wasn't a "problem problem," but when someone complains, they go out and try to tell the children they can't skate in the parking lots.

"If it's the same children we're dealing with, we'll have to take action and file a trespass charge after a warning," Rowan added. "It's a problem in the essence that they're skateboarding on the property after hours... its a liability issue."

Most of the complaints, Rowan said, came from Auto Options. Jenny Tullo, Auto Options' co-owner, said she realized the large parking lot in front of her building "was their favorite place to do it," but she complained that the skateboarders have been tearing stuff up on the property until she started calling the police on them.

"When they have hung out there, they leave their drinks here," she said. "It's destructive, and they don't understand that because they're kids."

L. C. Hardy, who watches over the Bill Owens Auto Sales lot downtown, said a long while ago he saw some skateboarders smash the car windows, but other than that incident, he never had problems with them.

Besides, "you can't stop them," he laughed as he pointed to the newly built ramp leading into the lot.

Ed Baldridge, who owns The Battlezone shop, says a lot of the skateboarders come to his shop all the time, and he encourages them to use the parking lot behind his store at night.

"They got to have someplace to go," he said.

Robert Moore, the owner of Moore's Main Street Car Care, said he shooed a few of them away last week when he caught them sitting on top of a washer he had in the back lot, but he did not see the skateboarders as a problem.

"My concern is that they don't get hurt or break anything," Moore said. "Kids are going to be kids. We were all kids at one point."

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