Recess Won't Let Skateboarding Die in Boone

Eric was a shop kid with no idea how to pour concrete. He learned anyway, on a stretch of pavement at the old Watauga High School that a handful of skaters had claimed as their own, and turned it into something special one feature at a time. Now he's back, running with the crew for Artisan Skate Parks. The company pouring Phase II of the town's real, permanent skate park. It's land Recess spent nearly a decade fighting to get.

“Full circle,” JP Pardy calls it. “It's a passion project for him.”

JP Pardy owns Recess. He opened the shop in 2009, back when Boone barely had anywhere for a skater to go. He's the reason there's a park to fight for at all.

This has never been easy up here. But it has always been worth it. The town had a public skate park through Parks and Recreation around 2006. The equipment got sold off a few years later and ended up rebuilt as what's now West Jefferson's park. After that, skaters built their own. The tennis courts at the old Watauga High School turned into the Boone DIY, a real skate park in its own right, poured one feature at a time by people who'd never worked with concrete before.

The county wanted the DIY spot gone. A handful of skaters put on button-up shirts. JP showed up like he always does. A skate shirt. They talked their way into staying, but the land could be sold out from under them any time. It was. Appalachian State bought it and built the university's track and field complex there. ASU said no to keeping a skate space in the plans.

Pardy started showing up to town meetings around 2017. Then-council member Janine Underwood told him to start a committee. She walked him through how Boone actually works. The county had the occupancy tax money and a new rec center mid-build. It wasn't interested. The Town of Boone had far less money. It had far more patience. It's stayed supportive ever since. “We've had really good support from the town,” Pardy said.

Finding land meant ruling almost everything out. JP says most of what they looked at sat in a flood plain, where you can't pour concrete. That's why, in his telling, the town has so many soccer fields and so little else. The site they landed on was once slated for a Humane Society relocation. It worked because nobody else wanted it, which is more or less the whole history of skateboarding in one lot.

Money took even longer than land. The first pitch was paving a lot and rebuilding DIY-style on top of it. That didn't survive contact with a calculator. Pouring fresh concrete only to treat it like scrap defeated the whole point. So the plan became a real 8,000-square-foot park, split into three phases. Recess ran shop meetings where the crew voted on what features they wanted. Artisan Skate Parks, out of the Outer Banks, took that wish list and turned it into an actual design.

Phase I cost $157,500 total. The Town of Boone put in $25,000. The skate community raised $55,000 themselves, through mini-golf nights at Sunrise Mountain Mini Golf, video premieres, and boards signed by team riders and raffled off. The Tony Hawk Foundation kicked in $5,000. A North Carolina Parks and Recreation Trust Fund grant covered the rest, $72,500.

Phase II took longer to fund than it will take to build. Recess spent two years chasing another matching grant. They got rejected twice, despite fixing everything the state flagged. The grant wasn't going to happen. Pardy went back to the town and asked for money directly. The Town of Boone put in another $25,000, and its Tourism Development Authority put in $70,000. Recess raised another $45,000 on top of that. Phase II runs $140,000 total. Between both phases, Recess and its community have raised $100,000 toward a park it doesn't own, and isn't trying to.

Delay has a price tag. Pardy once figured the whole project would run $300,000 to $350,000. By the time materials caught up with the pandemic, that estimate had jumped closer to $440,000. A hurricane didn't help either. Recess paused its own fundraising during Hurricane Helene to pitch in elsewhere in the community. Pardy doesn't regret it. He doesn't count it as lost time either.

One thing moved faster. Pardy formed what he called a skateboard committee and got Boone's skateboarding ordinance rewritten. Police used to write a fifty dollar ticket for riding a skateboard on a sidewalk. Another fifty if you skipped the helmet. Skateboards are now treated like pedestrians anywhere in town except King Street. Other towns have borrowed Boone's language to rewrite their own. Pardy points to Surf City.

Phase II should wrap in about six weeks, weather depending. Artisan's crew is already doing touch-up work while they're on site. They're resetting pool coping that took a beating over the summer. Phase III, the bowl, goes last because of where it sits in the lot. The park is being built from the back forward, so the bowl's spot is the last one reachable.

A new GoFundMe is coming in a few weeks. Until then, just walk into the shop and ask for JP. He's already thinking past Phase III too. A covered area eventually. Maybe lights. Once Phase II wraps, Recess plans a showcase event to mark it. Watch the shop's socials. More is coming on funding the bowl.

The list of local businesses that have chipped in keeps growing. Gamekeeper ran a dinner fundraiser. Hatchet Coffee poured a skate park drink special. Chaney Concrete and Vulcan donated concrete and gravel outright.

Pardy has outlasted three mayors and four town managers since he started going to meetings in 2017. He's not shy about why nobody beat him to it. Boone never had a parks and rec staffer inside the building pushing for a skate park the way one might push for a greenway.

“The problem with us is we haven't had anybody in that position that wanted to build,” he said.

So it fell to skaters and one shop. Meeting after meeting, for the better part of a decade.

Along the way, they rewrote a town ordinance too, the same one Surf City and other towns now use as their own template. Keeping skateboarding alive in Boone ended up changing it somewhere else.

Still in a skater shirt. “Somebody's got to do it for the future of skateboarding,” Pardy said. “And the kids.”