An indoor skate park in South Philly keeps a neighborhood on the edge

"I think it's cool that they took this old warehouse, added some wood and made a community there."

Patrick Guidotti spins at the edge at South Philly Bowl.
Hillary Petrozziello

From a distance, it’s a small, unassuming warehouse like any other just off Washington Avenue on the west side of Broad. It’s only when you get up close that you can hear the whirring sound of skateboard wheels sliding across wood and realize something unusual is going on inside. 

South Philly Bowl, as its known to the professional skateboarders who swing through town, is nestled inside a dirty, burgundy warehouse on Alter Street in Point Breeze. To get there, you pass by two boarded-up row homes plastered with orange L&I notices. The block looked much the same when Scott Kmiec first checked it out eight years ago. He spotted the warehouse when he was driving back from New York with friends after skating at the Autumn Bowl, a D.I.Y. skate park inside an old rope factory in Brooklyn.

In the winter, Philly skaters don’t have a lot of local options: suburban, anodyne indoor skate parks overrun by 12-year-olds, or freeze your ass off at FDR Park. To find the edgy, exciting skating they live for, serious skaters needed to travel when the temperatures dropped. 

So Kmiec and his friends decided to change that. He signed a lease, and they set about building the kind of park they longed for. 

“We got [wood] any which way we could,” Kmiec says. “People chipped in money. People donated supplies. We ‘borrowed’ wood from housing developments.”

Nine months later, the bowl was complete and awesome. The bowl is steep, making it fast and challenging, and the height varies every few feet to provide variety and the possibility for more tricks. A bulge in the middle of the vaguely oval space alternates between obstacle and launch ramp, depending on the line the skater takes. 

But completion of the bowl was a nervous time for Kmiec. “Back then, the crazy part was having no clue if the minute we did all this work and we would start skating, [would] the neighbors would show up and go ‘What the hell are you doing? You gotta go!’”

Things have been peaceful for years, but this past spring, the skate park received its first complaint — a polite letter slid underneath the door.

Ethan Solomon, 25, had bought the house directly behind the bowl in March. Sleep is important to the Penn med student. “I need to wake up early to get to the hospital,” he says.

But Solomon has no desire to see the skate park shut down. “I think it’s cool that they took this old warehouse, added some wood and made a community there,” he says. Beyond skate sessions and First Friday art shows, that community has kept skaters like Kmiec skating well into their 40s.  

Kmiec and Solomon have worked together to reduce the noise, starting with reduced hours — no more skating til 2 a.m. — and adding soundproofing to the window facing Solomon’s home. Solomon appreciates the effort. “Scott has been great,” he says. “They’ve [been] very responsive.” 

Kmiec’s crew is enforcing a midnight curfew and banning loud music from the skate park. 

While Solomon’s now cool and the late-night noise has been reduced, the risk of getting kicked out remains. There are still abandoned houses on the block, but now a pair of $300,000 row homes have gone up, the kind that feature granite countertops and roof decks. 

Kmiec is hoping to be able to use the space for another two years, until the building’s lease runs out. But the changing real-estate dynamics in the neighborhood make the economics of renting out an old warehouse, as opposed to developing a handful of houses, less attractive. The median home value in Point Breeze jumped from $44,000 in 2000 to $116,000 in 2012, according to U.S. Census data, which translates to a 211 percent rise in a little over a decade. 

As neighborhoods gentrify, the edgy, gritty things that make a city so exciting can be lost. Community gardens on long fallow lots turn into row homes, and old warehouses often turn into loft apartments. In New York, for example, the Autumn Bowl in Brooklyn — the very skate park that inspired Kmiec and his crew — has been converted into co-working space.

Kmiec, now 40 with a wife, two kids and a house a few blocks away in Graduate Hospital, appreciates the irony of the situation. “It’ll be white men with money that end up getting us kicked out,” he says with a laugh.