The $300,000 park was funded through the Maryland-National Capital Parks and Planning Commission after Hyattsville’s City Council received community input about creating a skate park in 2005. The closest skate park is another commission-funded park in Mount Rainier, about 2.5 miles away.
The Rhode Island Avenue park is set to open in mid-March. Although several concrete ledges are still being poured, some skateboarders have already begun using the site. The commission wants to install a chain-link fence to prevent access until it is completed, said Brenda Iraola, the commission’s landscape architect supervisor.
Hyattsville police spokesman Chris Purvis said skateboarding in restricted areas has not been a problem for the city. Commission spokesman Craig Kellstrom said the project developed from requests by local youths asking the city for a place to skateboard.
The 5,400-square-foot skate park will feature vertical ramps and copings, ledges, Theberge’s artwork, embedded boulders, staircases and handrails and will account for $210,000 of the overall project. Benches, an expanded parking lot, a walking path and a half basketball court will be installed in spring.
Don Wimer, site superintendent for American Ramp, said that although the company has built skate parks around the United States and in other countries, Melrose Skate Park is unique because of the artwork and its natural features.
America Ramp saw Theberge’s work in 2009 when the company was building a park in Gaithersburg and recruited her for the project.
“The art wall is a very unique aspect of [the] park. We typically don’t put in a lot of blank canvases, because local artists will tag it,” Wimer said. “I think the park is going to be well-used, and the kids are going to enjoy it. While it is small, it has a lot of unique features.”
The Hyattsville mural is a three-piece glass-tile mosaic flat against three free-standing concrete slabs, or “blank canvases,” Wimer said.
The mosaic’s blue and green, reflective colored tiles make up a scene of waves and swimming shad, indigenous to the Anacostia River, which runs to the west of the skate park.
Theberge said she has done works with shad before and felt the waves meshed well with the curves and wavy features of the park.
Some of Theberge’s previous works include two mosaic benches in Hyattsville’s Magruder Park, a mosaic outside the Glut food co-op in Mount Rainier and a mural outside the Gateway Arts Center in Brentwood.
Iraola said Parks and Planning wanted to incorporate artwork in the park to blend with the Gateway Arts District, a collection of arts-focused municipalities comprised of Hyattsville, Mount Rainier, North Brentwood and Brentwood.
Iraola noted an abstract-shaped shading canvas and multicolored concrete areas, benches and a backboard for the basketball court. “A lot of it is supposed to have a little bit of a wow factor.”
Theberge began installing the mural Dec. 14 with the help of her husband, Shahin Shikhaliyev, an oil painter.
The mural took Theberge about a month to complete, assembling the glass tiles piece by piece in her home studio. The installation took Theberge and Shikhaliyev about a week to complete. They also had to paint the remaining negative space of the concrete slabs and repair portions of glass tile that fell off during installation.
“This was a lot of fun, to work on a skate park,” Theberge said. “This was a neat project to be cooperative and collaborative with. I just love the physicality and power of it.”
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