After scoping it out on our ride out in Montauk last June, I had to actually get to the Greenport Skate Park on my Tonic. The earlier ride out to this area was to do some wedding planning, so it was fitting that I would get to ride right before my wedding on August 21st.
Teresa and I were staying with her sister Lisa and brother-in-law Kahlil on Shelter Island. Kahlil and I both own Tonic Fall Guys. So when the right moment presented itself, we headed over on the North Ferry to rip Greenport.
Greenport is a pretty interesting park. It is very large for a park located in such a small and remote community. There is a huge metal-surfaced vert ramp that seems not to get a lot of attention except as a platform for ollieing off of, a big spined mini ramp that's also surfaced with metal, and a series of concrete and wood surfaces. It is simultaneously really awesome for its ambition and disappointing for its execution. Don't get me wrong: a free, public skate park is a free public skate park. It is just that there was so much investment in the construction of this park and not a whole lot of design sense. Like many older parks it really lacks flow, and that lack of flow negates some of its magnitude.
To be honest, Kahlil did most of the ripping:
I am still very much in my "early stages" of learning to ride parks, and was extra careful (and extra padded up) as I did not want to come home injured two days before Teresa and I were to get married.
One feature of this park that makes it funny is that it is pretty much deserted. Maybe it gets more intense periodically, but both times that I have visited it has been desolate. No worries about snake sessions here! On this day there were three brothers there, the oldest riding a bike, the second riding a skateboard, and the youngest riding a scooter. The kid on the bike was pretty sick:
I would take pretty much any park if it were down the block from me, but my local park (Owl's Head in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn) is a lot better than this one. Still, it's nice to know that each summer when Lisa and Kahlil vacation in Shelter Island that we can visit this park.
