In snide Sentinel story by Dan White we read last week that the City Parks and Rec staff want to turn Mike Fox Park in to the permanent home for the skateboard park now at the entrance to the wharf. Isn't that just great.
My neighborhood, Lower Ocean, has one park, Mike Fox Park. Three tennis courts and a roller hockey court crammed into some houselots that were wreaked when the levee went in in 1965. There used to be a little swing set and sand box at the west end of it, but they were convered to a construction staging area a few years ago. So that's our only park, because Jessie St. Marsh doesn't count yet.
I say snide because Dan White, a Sentinel reporter who I don't like--he's Old Sentinel--he wrote "aging tennis courts" is if that really matters or is even true, and I was inspired to write "an aging Sentinal reporter" but that isn't very nice, so I didn't and just stuck to the subject at hand, which is a skateboard park.
Santa Cruz already has a skateboard park, called The Fun Spot. The site of the Fun Spot will someday be the site of a Visitors' Center for Monterey Bay Sanctuary, and that is good. So, do we really need to replace the skateboard park?
My problem here is that this is yet another tax-payer funded city amenity that servers male humans. Don't we have enough public support for male entertainment? Please please please don't say "girls and women can use the skate board park too" because that is just thinking hypothetically and parenthetically. If there were any outdoor public area that was frequented by girls and women with the same overwelming majority as a skateboard park was frequented by boys and men, the world would split open.
If you're talking about a smaller and smaller pie of public money to go around, maybe we should give a few more slices to parks and recreation activities that girls can enjoy too.
Can we? Just this once. So actually, my problem is that I don't want a skateboard park in my backyard, I don't want a skateboard park in anyone's "backyard" unless it is a private backyard behind a six-foot plank fence where you can party however you want to in the privacy of your own suburban backyard; that's why we bought it.
But anyway, I can't send that argument to the Parks & Rec Commission and the City Council, so I just sent my email saying I didn't want it because Mr. Mike Fox donated the land to the City to be used as tennis courts and a children's playground and you don't want to insult the dead that way. That, plus if you have a place for teenagers to hang out in my neighborhood, it's just a matter of time before people start selling herion and blowjobs there. Let's just not make a marginally area worse.