That Free Skatepark In Your Town? Tony Hawk Paid For It

Tony Hawk turned pro at 16 and became skateboarding's biggest name. He also started getting emails from parents whose kids had been ticketed, or even arrested, just for skateboarding in the street.

No Place Left to Skate

Through the 1990s and early 2000s, skateboarding was banned or restricted on most public property in American towns.

Plenty of cities had no skatepark at all, so kids skated the only pavement they could find: sidewalks, parking lots, drained pools, empty lots.

That put them in direct conflict with local police. Some got fines. Some got arrested.

A Foundation Funded By A Game Show

Hawk had spent his whole career on a skateboard. It bothered him that kids doing the same thing he did for a living were being treated like criminals.

In 2002 he used part of the $125,000 he'd won on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: Celebrity Edition to start the Tony Hawk Foundation.

The plan was simple: fund cities to build a free, legal public skatepark instead of chasing kids off the street.

Nearly 700 Parks and Counting

The foundation was renamed The Skatepark Project in 2020 to better reflect what it actually does.

By the organization's own count, it has now helped fund close to 700 free public skateparks in all 50 states.

Those parks draw an estimated 17 million visitors a year, according to the charity's own figures. Grants have totaled more than $13 million over the program's history.

Somewhere Legal to Go

Many of the towns that received grants could not have afforded a skatepark on their own. A lot of them are lower-income communities that had nowhere else to send kids who wanted to skate.

Hawk still sits on the organization's board. He has shown up to skate some of the parks it funded himself, including one in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

It started because a bunch of kids had nowhere legal to skate. There is a good chance one of those free public skateparks is sitting in your own town right now.