A new skate park in Queen’s Park is starting to take shape and aiming to open by the end of the year.
Because the new high school is being built on the site of the former skate park, the city had to find a new location for the facility – ultimately selecting the old reservoir/tennis courts site in Queen’s Park.
“Construction is moving along,” said Dean Gibson, the city’s director of parks and recreation. “We are a few weeks behind schedule from where we ideally wanted to be at this time of the year. There is no other particular reason why that has been happening than other just the site conditions prior to when they started doing the concrete forming.”
Gibson said it took a bit longer to start the concrete forming work than hoped because a fair amount of soil had to be excavated from below the tennis courts.
“Some of those conditions, you can’t fully understand what they are going to be until you are actually in the ground. In that particular case, that is what happened,” he said. “We needed to remove more soil than was originally expected so that added some additional time onto the project itself. We are well past that particular point now.”
Crews are now working on forming the skate bowls and applying the concrete, Gibson said.
“The current timeline for the completion of the skate park in Queen’s Park is end of December,” he said. “This schedule is, of course, somewhat weather dependent. The contractor is working through rainy weather by using tarps to keep the site dry, and lights to extend the available working hours. Prolonged periods of snow may have a more substantial impact.”
