The City of Tampa is working to renovate Perry Harvey Sr. Park, while incidentally having to tear up the “Bro Bowl,” a skating attraction that has been with the park since it opened in 1978. These plans for redevelopment have created a spark among the local skate community, and many local skaters are taking a stand to save their beloved bowl.
City officials scheduled a public meeting to discuss the redevelopment of Perry Harvey Sr. Park on Sept. 16. At the meeting local skateboarders, including members from the UT surf club, came to protest the new park proposal due to the fact the plan includes the removal of the Bro Bowl.
Frederico D’Apuzzo, senior international business and entrepreneurship major, started the UT surf club with the intent to teach students how to surf and skate. They use the bowl for this purpose.
“I had always wanted to do surfing here, so we went to OSLE and it was a really easy process,” D’Apuzzo said. “After that, we just started recruiting people and we teach surfing and surfing-like stuff.”
The members of the UT surf club are concerned that if the Bro Bowl is destroyed, they won’t have a place to teach students how to skate.
“The way it’s set up it’s almost like surfing. The way the curves and drops are, it’s almost like riding a wave,” said Dylan Cucci, a junior business management major and member of the surf club. “The club would help kids learn. We could teach more people, possibly on a weekly basis if they keep the Bro Bowl.”
The City of Tampa plans to honor the African-American history of Central Avenue by creating a history walk-through in Perry Harvey Sr. Park, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The history walk is a memorial to honor former black leaders of the Central Avenue area.
The city is hoping to make everyone happy by creating a park that honors the area’s heritage of arts and music while creating a brand new state of the art skate park just south of I-275, according to 10 News Tampa Bay.
However, local skaters believe it is a historical landmark and a part of skateboarding’s heritage. Many of these people are petitioning to get the bowl on the National Register of Historic Places.
“It’s one of the original skate bowls in the country. It has lots of culture and its been there mad long. [The local skaters] are trying to get it registered as a historical monument,” Cucci said.
The Bro Bowl was built in 1978 during the “skatepark era,” according to the Bro Bowl’s website. This era ranged from 1976 to 1982, and during this time, over 200 skate parks were built throughout the U.S. Today only three of those original skateparks still exist, the Bro Bowl in Tampa, Kona in Jacksonville and Derby in Santa Cruz, Calif. The Bro Bowl was once the only public skatepark in Florida and was only the second built along the East Coast.
Chad Greenberg, freshman journalism major and another member of the UT surf club, said, “It is history. You can feel the amount of people that have skated there.”
The Bro Bowl is the last remaining historical structure from the park when it first opened, and it only occupies one percent of the 11 acres that make up Perry Harvey Sr. Park.
On the Bro Bowl website, there is a revision of the city’s original plan that was created to show how the renovations could be completed without the destruction of the Bro Bowl. It is also argued that the Bro Bowl should be a part of the history walk that would be created during the reconstruction.
Not only is the Bro Bowl known in the historical community, but it has also gained fame for its appearance in many media outlets.
The Bro Bowl has appeared in numerous articles over the years, a Tony Hawk video game, the backdrop for a number of industry ads, commercials, skate videos and was the subject of a documentary film. It has become a place of pilgrimage, visited by some of skateboarding’s most famous riders over the years.
It is clear that the Bro Bowl has played a huge part in both the history of Tampa and skateboarding. To many, the bowl is a historical landmark and a skateboarding icon. It is for this reason that so many people are doing whatever it takes to save it.
The Bro Bowl should be kept as part of the park! There is room for all walks of life in the park. Hasn’t been said that life is like a walk in the park???