Grand Opening
The Oak Creek South Skate Park grand opening will be Friday, May 7. The park is at 790 Miamisburg-Centerville Road. The lineup:
4 to 4:30 p.m.: Skateboarding demonstrations and live music by Old English and the Centerville High School band.
4 to 6 p.m.: Vendors from local skate and bike shops will be open on the walkway to the park.
4:30 to 5 p.m.: The grand-opening ceremony will include a ribbon-cutting on the stage.
5 to 6 p.m.: There will be open skating and biking, and live music.
WASHINGTON TWP., Montgomery County — It was a long time coming, but the Oak Creek South Skate Park will make its official debut on Friday, May 7.
The grand opening, which starts at 4 p.m., will include skateboarding demonstrations, live music and refreshments.
According to Bob Feldmann, development manager for the Centerville-Washington Park District, the construction of a skate park has been requested by area residents for a long time.
“We have had a lot of interest (in a skate park) for the last 10 to 12 years,” Feldmann said. “It’s a different animal. That one’s been fun to see being built.”
The 9,000-square-foot skate park is just part of the large-scale overhaul of Oak Creek South Park, at 790 Miamisburg-Centerville Road, which has been in the works for four or five years.
The park, which had three baseball diamonds and a pond, now has a playground, a shelter house, two baseball diamonds, a stream and, of course, the skate park.
Dave Dunkle, the owner of One Love Skateshop in Kettering, will be among the skaters performing at the grand opening.
“There will be some guys doing some pretty cool things,” he said.
Dunkle said the new skate park is unlike the skate plaza built at Indian Riffle Park in Kettering a few years ago.
“This one is geared toward transition skating, with ramps and bowls,” Dunkle said. “The one in Kettering is geared toward street skating.”
But Dunkle added that the new park, like the Kettering park, is well-built.
“There are smooth transitions and seams,” he said. “Some of the parks built earlier are not as well-constructed. They probably didn’t have the budget.”
Feldmann said the skate park cost $320,000 to build, adding that it and the majority of the park renovations were paid for by a 10-year parks levy passed in 2004 and by a donation from the Centerville Kiwanis Club.
The conversion of the pond to a stream, which cost $400,000, was paid for by a Wetlands Mitigation Project with Walmart.
“It was aquatically dead,” Feldmann said of the pond. “We decided the best thing to do was to take it back to a creek like it once was.”
There also are plans to add two lighted tennis courts, walking paths and multiuse trails to the park in the next couple years, according to Feldmann.
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jikelley
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