words by Ricky Covach
Perched atop a hill of boulders and orange clay and surrounded by Carolina pines, Chapel Hill Skatepark has welcomed skateboarders up its winding driveway for almost three decades. The park is the oldest outdoor skatepark in North Carolina, originally constructed by Jim Reese at a cost of $75,000 ($150,000 in today’s dollars). Upon its grand opening in winter of 1999, the 10,000-foot Skatelite park was immediately one of the highest quality, most modern parks in the state. Skaters began to flock to the park not only from around North Carolina but also from Virginia and South Carolina, and in 2000, Endless Grind Skateshop held the first contest. The following year, Andrew Reynolds brought the Baker Summer Tour to CHSP. Toy Machine and Enjoi brought their tours in summer of 2002. Other contests and demos like these continued throughout the rest of the 2000s, and in 2009 we had a premiere for the CHSP crew’s full-length video.
In 2013, CHSP experienced a major shift that was representative of many other parks across America: it went from a paid private skatepark to a free public skatepark. The shop building located at the park was closed, no longer necessary for collecting admission fees or selling concessions. Without the daily maintenance of an on-site staff, the Skatelite ramps gradually began to age, and after Covid it became clear that a permanent solution was necessary to keep the park alive.
In 2023, 5th Pocket Skateparks, a Philadelphia-based skatepark construction company, was contracted to begin work on a new park in Hillsborough, the town directly next to Chapel Hill. Discussions had already begun a year or two earlier within Chapel Hill’s Parks & Recreation Department about replacing the park with concrete, and finding a builder was the only missing piece. $500,000 in funding had been allocated for the renovation. The CHSP community loved the way that 5th Pocket designed and built Hillsborough after skating it, and we connected them with the Town of Chapel Hill to make sure they got the bid for the CHSP renovation. At the first design meeting, we communicated to 5th Pocket unanimously that we wanted to keep the park design generally the same but make a few needed improvements, and 5th Pocket heard us clearly and provided a design that did that.
5th Pocket started building the new concrete version of CHSP directly on top of the previous slab after the town cleared out the Skatelite ramps in August of last year. Over the next four months, pouring each week, the new park began to take shape. 5th Pocket worked with the Chapel Hill skate community throughout the entire process to make sure at every step that they were making exactly what the community wanted, rather than designing a plan in advance and sticking to it. Several different major changes were made to the design as things began to actually take shape, and that flexibility allowed us to get the most of the space we had. A new bowl and mini Baldi replica were also added in an area that was previously a grass lawn, increasing the area of the park by about 40%, and we paid tribute to a famous local spot by adding a replica.
In North Carolina in 1999, wooden parks were the standard and skating a concrete park was a rare treat. By 2025, concrete parks had become the standard and skating a Skatelite park all of a sudden felt like a trip back in time. CHSP weathered all of that evolution while remaining one of NC’s favorite parks, and it is now once again one of the premier parks in the state, with people driving in each week from all over the region. If your park needs a renovation or your town needs its first park, make it a goal to work with a builder who listens to and works with the local community.
