Greenport Sound & Skate Festival Returns to Greenport Skate Park

Greenport has fostered a lively skateboarding community since the village’s skate park was first built in 1998, but the facility now requires extensive repairs due to decay. The Greenport Skate Park is hosting the Greenport Sound & Skate Festival to fundraise for creating safer conditions and raising awareness for the skating community.

President of the Greenport Skate Park, Rena Wilhelm, local business owner of The Weathered Barn, explained that she got involved in the project in 2019 after seeing photos that 11-year-old Dane Jensen asked his mother to post of the damaged park in a Facebook group.

“I saw those pictures and thought, ‘This is ridiculous!’ It was just heartbreaking,” Wilhelm says. “I am one of those people who just dives headfirst into a situation even if I don’t really know what I am getting into, and all I know is that I felt horrible for this kid and all of his friends.”

The 20,000-square-foot playground for various wheeled sports was the first skate park to be built on Long Island. The park has the largest vert ramp (halfpipe) on Long Island, along with a variety of quarter pipes, funboxes, rails and other elements.

Over time, it has decayed with rotten boards, loose nails, cracked concrete and trash.

“I feel like the park probably would’ve been destroyed or just left to rot if no one came forward and said, ‘Hey, this is a great asset for kids, and we should be fixing it,’” Wilhelm says. “I feel like I have given this community a little bit of hope that there are people out there who care about it.”

Wilhelm formed a committee in 2019 and started trying to help by resurrecting a long-defunct festival at the skate park, but COVID-19 hit and quickly stopped their plans. She views the pause as a blessing in disguise because it gave her time to surround herself with the people she needed to move forward with this project.

In 2022, they received approval to create Greenport Skate Park Inc., an official not-for-profit entity dedicated to maintaining the structural integrity and safety of the park, according to the website. In August 2022, they held their first Greenport Sound & Skate Festival since the revitalization of the project.

“It was a great mix of people from local and regional areas and a whole mix of different demographics and ages, which is basically what skate culture is anyway,” Wilhelm notes.

The heat during August 2022 caused them to move the 2023 festival to October, but it rained every weekend in October, so they were forced to cancel it.

Greenport Skate Park Inc. hosts other fundraising events, such as the Decked Out fundraiser, where 30 artists painted skate decks to be auctioned off.

They recently hired a skate park designer from Seattle and received a visual of what the park could look like, along with costs. The first phase of the project to renovate the park costs $1 million, and it only covers one-third of the park. They just hit $100,000 in their fundraising efforts.

“Now these kids know that we are putting our money where our mouth is, and we are not just saying, ‘Oh, we hope, we wish,’” Wilhelm explains. “I actually put more work into this than my own business. I think for many years what they saw was all talk, but no one actually really did anything or delivered anything.”

The Greenport Skate Park is hosting the 2024 Greenport Sound & Skate Festival as to celebrate all of skate culture, which is heavily influenced by music and art. The fundraising event features a skating competition, live music from six bands, a graffiti and mural contest with 24 artists, crafts for kids, vendors and more at the park (170 Moores Lane) on Saturday, July 13, from 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

The event is family-friendly and free to attend.

None of the six park board members, including Wilhelm, skate, so when they needed help organizing the contest aspect, they were put in contact with Limitless Culture, owned by Will Angiulo.

Limitless Culture is a skate culture promotion company that will be hosting the skateboarding competition. Angiulo travels to skate parks across Long Island, hosting skate contests and offering raffle and cash prizes. Around 50 people from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are expected to participate in the skateboarding contest.

“This is the perfect person for this job because we have our hands tied with every other aspect of the festival,” Wilhelm says. “He is a really beloved member of the skate culture on Long Island.”

The music will be a combination of alt-rock, folk rock, hardcore and mixed-genre. The lineup put together by music director Philip Staples features the bands: The Fulcrum, RX Kingzz, Clovers Curfew, The Great Lie, The Big Happy and the East End Arts Youth Program.

Graffiti and studio fine artists from Long Island, New Jersey and New York City will be completing canvases during the day that will then be judged in the evening for a cash prize. There will be face painting, crafts and mural painting for kids led by Deb Zimmerman and Andrea Bisignani.

More than 40 vendors will be selling their merchandise, skateboards, food and more.

“Our movement is not just to raise money, but we are celebrating them (skaters) as a community rather than just fixing the skate park,” Wilhelm adds. “It is such a big encompassing project of building a safer park and growing and celebrating the community.”

Learn more about the Greenport Sound & Skate Festival and the Greenport Skate Park Revitalization Project at greenportskatepark.org or on Instagram @greenportskatepark.