Eugene’s skateboarders find a nighttime home at the Washington + Jefferson Skatepark.

An unoccupied skateboard rolls on after a miscalculated trick sends its rider hurtling toward concrete. The ground provides no give to comfort a landing at full speed. Yet, the skater doesn’t show any pain. He laughs, claps his hands, gets up, and runs after the board to try again.
Nearby, 30-year-old veteran skateboarder Ashley Marion glides past, focused on conquering his own obstacles at the Washington-Jefferson Skatepark, located beneath the I-105 bridge. A skater for 18 years, the Eugene native has faced his fair share of injuries, but he doesn’t care, skating on as the sounds of crashing boards amplify through the busy park.
As a train passes nearby it vibrates the bridge’s pillars. To Marion, these sounds become white noise. What matters is the freedom of skating at WJ — something the Eugene skater community was without before the park’s construction less than a year ago. Along with being the largest covered skatepark in America at 23,000 square feet, WJ remains open until 1 a.m., and lights built into its highway canopy illuminate the park’s obstacles into the late hours. On any given night, the park entertains dozens of skateboarders. The streets beyond WJ’s boundaries are dark. But within, the lights provide a feeling of safety.
Planning for the project began in 1990 when a group of skaters met with city officials to plead their need for a large skate park in Eugene. After a stalled development process due to a lack of funding, Eugene landscape architect Emily Proudfoot took over as project manager in 2008.
“There was a vision for it a long time ago,” she says. “For a lot of people it’s like a dream come true.” Proudfoot says when planning the park she prioritized safety, particularly at night. And despite concerns about overnight camping, City of Eugene officials acquiesced to the skateboarding community’s request to keep the park open until 1 a.m. “For visibility, we used to have to go to parking garages to see, but now the skate park just gives us a good place to go late at night,” Marion says.
Overnight camping and drug use remain problems on the outskirts of the park, and on most nights groups of vagrants gather across the street, using the bridge as shelter. Before the skatepark was built, the area was a large sandpit with old playground equipment seemingly deserted.
 
“We had a terrible public safety problem there,” Proudfoot says. “It was kind of overrun with people who were homeless, drug-addicted, had felony convictions — it was not a safe place to be for most people.” Many skaters felt that danger, choosing to avoid the area before the park was built. “It was pretty abandoned,” Marion says. “They weren’t utilizing the space down there, and it made it so people could be pretty sketchy. It made that part of town worse.”
Caleb Grant, a 23-year-old Eugene native, says that he has been skating in Eugene his whole life, but is still pessimistic despite WJ providing a newfound safe haven for skaters. “This park has helped out a lot, but this area is still a mess,” he says, gesturing to the basketball courts beyond the skate park. “Over there you still get the bad apples, a lot of people doing drugs here and stuff.”
“I’ve literally seen people doing crack in the open. I’ve walked in on someone shooting up heroin in the bathroom.”
 
Proudfoot admits that the situation is not perfect, but points out that the increased visibility from the bright lights at night has improved the situation. “The truth is, there are hundreds of more people coming to that park every day than we have before. When you just have that many more people coming to that park for a legitimate use, it just improves safety so much,” she says. Safety aside, many see the park as an escape from a society’s negative stereotypes of skateboarders.
According to Marion, WJ offers a space to avoid street skating, where many are seen as a nuisance. For skating streets, people will definitely get upset if you show up at their business trying to use it as a skate spot,” he says. He wouldn’t go so far as to call it discrimination, but acknowledges that some are friendlier than others. “Some people will come up and get kind of physical with the skaters,” he says. “People can freak out about it more than they need to, or threaten to call the cops.” Seeking to dodge possible confrontation, Marion takes to WJ skatepark and skates into the night.
Often the park is most popular at night. Skaters share the sentiment that riding in a public skatepark is an effective way to avoid trespassing or provoking law enforcement. At night, many opt to be within their own community of skateboarders, not isolated in the foreboding, dark streets of Eugene.
“There’s this saying, ‘If you don’t have a skatepark, then your city is a skatepark,’” says Proudfoot. “We really have provided a destination for people to go. We can direct them to the skatepark.”
Grant was drawn there, and stayed. He spends nearly every day at WJ. He’s at home there, feeling like the rest of the city rejects him. “They don’t take the time to get to know us,” he says. “Everyone I know skates. I know how skateboarders are. They’re good people, but they get frowned upon.”
Despite continued drug use around the park and unfriendly city streets, the local skateboarding  community has bonded around WJ as a place to take pride in. Some skaters even make an extra effort to keep the park clean. “They’ll go through and pick up all the soda cups and cigarette butts and throw them in the trash,” Marion says. “As a skater, I don’t want to be rolling through and eat it because of some trash on the ground.”
As the clock creeps past 10 p.m. the night under the bridge has just begun for the many skateboarders at WJ. Some simply watch for a time, forming an outer ring surrounding the park, lines of skateboards against the walls, cigarette smoke filling the cool air. The night carries on as they take turns dropping in, gliding, and carefree.

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(Sam Richards/Ethos)