Freedom Skatepark's 5th Birthday: Five Years of Trenton Makes
Words by Jake McNichol
We recently kicked off the fifth annual Trenton Winter Skateboarding Program at Freedom Skate Park. We celebrated the only way we skateboarders know how: with loud music, big tricks, and a few slams.
You can see all in the recap video. What you can’t see is the incredible effort from the New Jersey skate community over the past five years that made this event possible.
When we started Freedom five years ago, we didn’t have money. We didn’t have skate industry connections. Most of us hadn’t even built a ramp before.
What we did have was a community in need. At the time, Trenton didn’t have a skate park and there weren’t any indoor parks in the entire state of New Jersey. There weren’t even any outdoor skate parks with lights. We had an underserved city filled with kids who needed more positive opportunities and a skate community desperate for somewhere to go when it was too dark, cold, or wet to skate outside.
This need drove us to come together and do something that no one had ever done before. We worked with the Mayor and City leadership to transform a historic building that was part of Trenton’s industrial past into a completely free indoor skate park. We scraped together money from skaters and non-skaters who believed in what we were doing, bought plywood and 2x4s for ramps, pieced them together in a backyard, and trucked them over in a rented U-Haul. We worked with our local skate shops to collect used decks and parts that we reassembled as boards for kids who didn’t have their own.
The community got us started, and the community helped us grow. When local skate park construction company 5th Pocket was asked to build the ramps for the House of Vans pop-up in Philadelphia in 2019, they got Vans to donate the ramps to us after the pop-up was done. A team of carpenters and metalworkers from Philadelphia and New York came together with our local crew to move and reassemble the obstacles in less than a week. This year, we repeated the process with the ramps from Independent’s Rip Ride Rally, which are getting new life at Freedom.
At the same time, NJ Skate Shop, Dogwood Skate Shop, and Travel Skate Shop have helped us provide skateboards to more than 200 at-risk kids in Trenton and our volunteers have showed up to teach them the basics. Now, kids who got their first boards at Freedom are ripping our contests and helping to run the park as volunteers.
More than just a place to skate when it’s too wet or dark to skate outside, Freedom is a monument to this community. This park couldn’t exist without all the hundreds of skaters, from Trenton, the Tri-State area in general, and around the world, who have come together to contribute their time, their sweat, and blood to make this space what it is.
If you’ve ever been to Freedom, thank you. Every single person who’s ever set foot in this space helped us get to five years and helps power us to keep going for many more. If you haven’t been, now’s the time! Come see for yourself what the skate community can do when we come together to build something for us all. We can’t wait to see you at the park!
Freedom Skate Park is located at the historic Roebling Wire Works building at 675 South Clinton Avenue in Trenton, New Jersey. Freedom is open to the public every Saturday from 12:00 - 6:00 p.m. Learn more at www.freedomnj.org.