Weeks before a crowd of skateboarders could ride down the new quarterpipe at Kenmore’s Prentiss Park for an Aug. 4 park celebration, a crew of volunteer skaters had to rake wet concrete into its forms.
In the month before that, the team’s prep work on the foundations of the quarterpipe captured the interest of neighbors, who stopped by to pick up trash, and kids, who helped tie reinforcement rods.
The ledges and curbs that sprang up from cracked tennis courts were the result of community input and experimenting with obstacle placements during design sessions. Though the park is rideable, it’s not finished and will continue to evolve over time — and that’s partly why Gary Dean, who heads the project, calls it a “living, breathing skate park.”
It’s not Akron’s first DIY park, but it’s gotten more traction than others with the backing of the 2024 Akron Parks Challenge. And Alex Yost, who leads the construction side of the project, said the park is orienting itself toward newcomers.
“This is definitely going to be a little bit more of a kid-friendly, beginner-friendly park than Akron Skate Park,” said Yost, who is from Hudson and has been skating for more than 20 years. “So most of the features are going to be a little bit smaller, more accessible to beginners.”
An Akron skateboarding scene that nearly disappeared
The quarterpipe matters even more when it’s contrasted with how Akron’s skate scene has faltered.
Michael Cohill, a fourth-generation Akronite and founder of the skate brand Polymer, recalls a local skate shop being formative when he started skating in 2010.
“I wanted to be like the cool older guys at the skate shop,” he said. “That’s no unique story — talk to anyone in any skate scene, it’s the same anywhere in the country.”
But that shop — Megapolis, open on Kenmore Boulevard from 2009 to 2011 — followed others that were forced to close, like Rubber City Rollers in Norton. Cohill said that struggle to stay afloat was widespread, and that it impacted the community.
While there were always kids at the skate park and diehards committed to the sport, the niche, tight-woven street skating community Cohill cares about was quiet.
“There hasn’t been a new generation to pass the torch to,” Cohill said. “I got taken under the wing of my older buddy who was 24 when I was 13. I’m 28 now, and I haven’t really been able to school the next generation.”
Building skateboarding community ‘renegade-style’
One part of the scene that’s lasted since its 2000 founding is First Glance, a Kenmore student center that provides community and Christian programming, including an indoor skate park that operates from October to April. Dean said he has been skating at places like this since he was a kid. Now, he’s a program leader there in addition to managing the Prentiss Park construction.
“There’s a lot of kids in Kenmore, and a lot of them are just kind of walking around the streets,” Dean said. “So in the wintertime, a lot of them just pop in and we give them boards and helmets and let them do their thing and figure it out.”
With his work at First Glance, Dean hopes to provide kids with new beginner-friendly sessions so they have the same opportunity to skate as he had growing up.
First Glance has a winter foothold, but building anything new in Akron has always meant improvising. Dean has worked on a now-demolished DIY build in Highland Square called “the rail yard,” and a smaller one still running on the south side of downtown called “the depot.”
“Typically, it’s very self-funded,” Dean said. “Me and a couple of friends get some money together, try to get a couple hundred bucks to get some concrete and renegade-style for it.”
More institutional parks exist, like Akron Skate Park, which is located by the Akron Fulton Airport. It’s leased by the city through at least 2027. But the Prentiss Park project took “the spirit of DIY” and got city backing through Akron City Council Member Tina Boyes, who pitched the idea for a skate park after Prentiss Park won a $150,000 Akron Parks Challenge grant.
Converging efforts point toward Akron skateboarding renaissance
The Prentiss Park construction isn’t the only place fueling what Dean calls Akron’s current “skateboard renaissance.” Cohill sees a convergence of three separate efforts.
“There’s kind of a revival happening because there’s this brand putting out local videos, there’s this skate shop that just opened that’s going to get more people skating, and then you’ve got Prentiss Park, which is going to be an awesome skate park because it’s built by skateboarders for skateboarders,” Cohill said.
The brand is Polymer, Cohill’s own. Its 2025 film, “Lighter Than Air,” features more than three dozen regional skaters. Cohill finds that street skating is a way of reading a city via its surfaces. In the film, Akron’s post-industrial landscape is on full display.
It’s present as a skater drops off the edge of Cascade Plaza’s rugged concrete architecture. Goodyear blimps float by skaters at the brick Central-Hower High School building. Down on South Main Street, street sculptures and garden beds break up clips with looming smokestacks and abandoned factories.
The shop Cohill referenced is Need, opened by Kyle Mowery downtown at 30 N. High Street in February. Even though Need is new, Mowery already intentionally treats it as a gathering spot.
“In the center of any good skateboarding scene, there’s always sort of a shop to get people to meet up and just have a place to go,” Mowery said. “Up until recently, skateboarding was kind of a group of outcasts, and a skate shop was always supposed to feel like a second home for those people.”
Mowery left town in 2015, when the scene, he said, was on a downturn. When he came back, there was no skate shop, and he didn’t want to go all the way to Cleveland for a new board.
Already, he hopes that Need can avoid the fate of Akron’s previous skate shops.
“Maybe the missing piece was just going for downtown Akron, where it should be close to where all the skaters are, close to where the spots are at,” Mowery said.
Mowery, Dean, Cohill and Yost are all featured in “Lighter Than Air.” The kind of network they’ve created is providing the infrastructure for skating’s surge in popularity in the area.
For Dean, the proof is on the street.
“It used to be that I wouldn’t see another skateboarder that I didn’t know,” he said. “Now, I’ll drive through downtown and see a couple different crews of kids that I don’t even know, which is really cool. And that means that skateboarding is actually taking hold in the city.”