Bitchslap Magazine Issue 13

"It's going to be the biggest thing that ever happened to Danish skateboarding" William Frederiksen Peter Stanners + Søren Enevoldsen / Nordarch Skateboarding didn’t save my life but it definitely steered me away from becoming as boring as my friends. Without it, my transition into adulthood would have probably taken a different path, one characterised by blazers, pointy leather shoes, tucked-in shirts and a management degree from a business school. At least that’s what I imagine. Instead of studying I spend my days say beneath the big oak tree in Fælledparken, breathing the summer’s warm dusty air, languishing in the smell of sweat and asphalt, listening to the clattering of boards, beats from boom-boxes and cheers of appreciation. But my favourite park was far from perfect. Dilapidated, frustrating and boring, the long Danish winters left a heavy toll on Fælledparken’s wooden ramps, leaving them warped, fractured and perilous. Still, we made the most of what we had. But we wanted better – something challenging, wicked and impervious to the weather. On June 17th 2011 the all-new concrete skatepark in Fælledparken will officially open. Beautiful, vast and immortal, it is the answer to our collective prayers. And this is how it came to be. couple of million to rebuild the entire park? It might be huge but it makes sense. Where do I start? “He told me, ‘All you need to do is talk about it. That's how things happen.’ He basically told me that if I talk about it enough to the right people it would just magically happen.” He was skeptical, but went ahead and drafted his vision for the park. “I wrote a description of how cool and awesome it could be and on the last page I pasted the picture of the largest concrete park I could find from the internet and wrote on it ‘Fælledparken anno 2010’.” As an employee of the city council, he met regularly with those in charge of developing Copenhagen’s recreational areas. To these meetings he brought his proposal and whenever possible talked up the idea of redeveloping the skatepark. But his vision fell on deaf ears, his proposal lying on desks gathering dust. In 2007, just before its 100-year anniversary, a fund was established to redevelop the whole of fælledparken. Around this time some wise spark in the council must stumbled across Williams plan and thought, ‘hey, this sounds like a good idea, we can use this.’ The skatepark suddenly had 3.5million kroner to be rebuilt. But the lobbying was still ongoing. By this time Søren Enevoldsen, who runs Urban landscape design company 27 THE STORY It began with a proposal in 2003. William Frederiksen had just become the manager the indoor Royal Copenhagen Skatepark. A sprightly man in his early 30s, he had a dream of creating a world-class outdoor skatepark to replace the ageing park at Fælledparken. So he approached the mayor’s advisor. “I asked him what are we going to do? Fælledparken looks like shit and has been shit for twenty years. How do I get a BS 13 previous page next page

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