It's almost impossible to visualize a beach city boardwalk without rollerbladers and skateboarders threading among beach cruisers, bicyclists, and pedestrians in skimpy attire and wetsuits. In many cases, the crowds of sun worshippers on the streets and sidewalks within a reasonable distance of the ocean are joined by skaters or skateboarders being pulled by dogs on a leashes or by others pulling surfboards strapped to skateboards behind their bicycles, increasing the congestion, conflict, and potential for incident and injury.

After the City of Huntington Beach banned skateboards downtown and Huntington Beach Unified High School banned skateboarding on campus, skateboarding enthusiasts demanded the city designate skateboarding areas.

The unusual project called for using consultants with wide-ranging expertise in recreation planning and design. Purkiss•Rose -RSI, the merged enterprise of landscape architects with diverse public park expertise and Recreation Systems, Inc.'s (RSI) specialists in development of leisure faciltiies for government clients, designed skateboard areas for community use at the high school football stadium and in Murdy Park. Both skateboarding facilities feature a "street scene" with curbs, benches, and small ramps and rails, developed by working with a volunteer group of riders, professionals, editors of a skateboard magazine and parents.

The "Soaring Dreams" of skateboarders in Huntington Beach's Murdy Park and high school football stadium are quite a bit different than those of the bronze children in the much-photographed "Soaring Dreams" civic plaza fountain adjacent to the aquatic center complex in Santa Fe Springs, for which consultants from Purkiss•Rose-RSI received the California Park and Recreation Society Special Purpose Award in 1985.

Caption: The community skateboarding areas that Purkiss•Rose-RSI designed for a public park and a high school in "Surf City, U.S.A." both feature a "street scene" with curbs, benches, and small ramps and rails.

Photos provided courtesy of Purkiss•Rose-RSI.