Sara Campos has been working to make Portland’s robust skateboarding scene more welcoming to all. Campos joined the City Cast Portland podcast to talk about those efforts and their work with Queer Skate PDX to push the city to build a new skate park on the West Side. We also asked them for their list of skate parks that have been most important to them:
Stronger Park (Milwaukie)
“It's a queer- and trans-owned skate park and I'm also just really good friends with the owner, AJ [Waters]. AJ let us take a bunch of their obstacles that are movable to a random spot and entrusted us with all of that. It really helped to be able to create a new skate space somewhere temporarily.”
Da Vinci Middle School Park (Kerns)
It’s “a very central location in the middle of Portland, but also it's a very big space, which is nice. The blacktop is really smooth. It just has a special place in my heart. It was really seeing different identities and different people in the skate community show up for each other.”
The Courts were so named because before skaters took over during the pandemic, they were abandoned tennis courts. (John Notarianni / City Cast Portland)
The Courts (Portland State campus)
“It was skater-maintained, skater-started. It has become such a cool meeting point for community. There's obstacles for every single level of skating, so you don't really get intimidated too much by what's there, because there's always something for everyone, which is really cool.”
