Skateboarders turn an abandoned North Portland mill into the new ‘Burnside.’
~ Sean Coker

Despite the high concentration of lead in the soil at 5828 N Van Houten Place, dandelions thrive in asphalt cracks. No signage hangs on the dilapidated concrete building, but the telltale signs of graffiti, a parking lot glinting with broken glass and the thunderclap of skateboards grinding homemade ramps let visitors know they have arrived.

“I don’t know who built it,” explains skater Greg Dumas between sessions. “But it shows the innovation of the skateboarding community … and it feels like Burnside [skate park].”

Ask forgiveness, not permission

Burnside Skate Park was built by skateboarders in the 1990s without city permission, and only received sanctioning years later.

Along the same lines, those mysterious concrete craftsmen who come at night to cement transitions — the curved segments that connect stretches of skating space — at the North Van Houten Place site are skating first and worrying about permission second. “Whoever owns the property on paper isn’t doing much with it,” says Dumas.  “And there’s a certain ownership that skateboarders bring.”

The North Portland building has been in use since the early 1900s for manufacturing lumber and concrete and serving as a dry dock, but years of neglect have allowed the space to be used as a squatter’s shelter and a canvas for graffiti artists looking to leave their mark.

The latest in a series of unofficial tenants are skateboarders who built transitions between the concrete floors and walls.  They’re also the ones who’ve swept clean the fractured glass and multicolored lids of spray paint cans that littered the floor like broken Easter eggs. Even so, there are still obstacles of many shapes and sizes, as skater Ian McMartin finds out after he rolls into a transition and grids a quarter pipe while avoiding a stray pit bull. ?

Homestead

Before abandoning the building to boarders, a conglomerate of companies purchased the property from the bankrupt Ridel North Portland Yard in ?1999, renaming the 35-acre site Triangle Park. Zidell Marine, one of the companies making up the consortium, considered using the space as a barge-building facility.

“We’ve owned the property for nearly a decade,” explains Zidell Marine spokesmen Larry Richards, “and we haven’t done anything with it yet.” Triangle Park LLC has been in talks with the University of Portland, which is adjacent to the property, for the past two years.  But nothing has come of the talks so far.
“The school can be a good steward of the land,” explains John Furey, associate director for media relations for University of Portland. “It’s a big piece of property that’s not being used.”

But “not being used” isn’t entirely accurate, considering that skateboarders are acting as custodians and have already begun the clean-up process, even if it is one spray-paint can at a time.  

While business has neglected the site, skateboarders have found an oasis to hone their craft and word has spread like wildfire. “I heard about the spot from a friend, and once I saw a broken-down fence I knew it was chill to enter,” explains Dumas. “We used to sneak around and once the cops came and spoke with us but they went away without problems.”

What’s next

As Triangle Park LLC and University of Portland argue over prices and responsibility to decontaminate the site, only skateboarders love this property for what it is and not what it could be. Like Burnside before it, whoever first swept the floors and began laying concrete down remains unknown.  But skaters are more concerned with innovation than commemoration.

Between drags off a cigarette before dropping into a quarter pipe, Dumas reflects on the finite time any underground skate spot has. “We’ll skate there until we get kicked out and we’ll go somewhere else. It’ll eventually get shut down and we’ll find somewhere new. In the meantime we’ll skate and not worry about a thing.”