Tom Dupere has been skating at Town Park for 30 years. This summer he finally got to pour more concrete into it, calling the chance to "give back to the community" the best part of the job. If you've driven past the ball fields on Friend Street lately and noticed fresh asphalt torn up near the old skate park, or heard the particular clatter of wheels on new concrete that wasn't there in July, you already know something changed. What most people passing by don't know is what it took to get there, and what that says about the price of building anything in this town right now.
Three Decades on the Same Patch of Ground
The skate park at Town Park didn't start as a park at all. Back in the 1980s, kids dragged wooden ramps onto the old tennis courts there and built their own setup out of whatever they could find. By the mid-1990s the city paved over the cracked courts and gave Amesbury its first real skate park, a prefabricated setup common to New England towns at the time. It wasn't glamorous, but skaters made it work for years.
The turning point came in 2018, when a local skater named Brian Eldredge passed away. His friends and family renamed the park in his memory, and the Amesbury Improvement Association set a goal of raising $45,000 to give the park its first real upgrade since the 1990s. Construction on that first phase began in late 2020, and by the time it wrapped, phase one had rebuilt about 5,000 square feet of the park in poured-in-place concrete, the same material used at professional-grade parks rather than the prefab ramps that had been there before. A committee that includes Eldredge's mother, Donna, and builder Tom Dupere has carried the project forward since.
What $45,000 Bought Then, and What $130,000 Bought Now
Once phase one was done, the committee turned to phase two. This time the number was $130,000, nearly three times the original ask, for an addition that ended up covering roughly 4,000 square feet, close to the same footprint as phase one but not quite as large.
That jump is worth sitting with. It's not a scientific price index, and the $45,000 figure was the group's opening fundraising target rather than an audited final cost. But the two numbers, six years apart, for comparable amounts of poured concrete in the same park, are a real measure of what construction costs have done to a project like this. Whatever inflated lumber, concrete, and labor prices have done to home renovations across the North Shore in that same stretch, this skate park felt it too.
The committee didn't quite hit $130,000 on its own. According to reporting from the Newburyport News, the group came up short of the goal but already had a scaled-down design ready to build with whatever they'd raised. Then Dan Healey, a philanthropist based in nearby Merrimac, made a donation that pushed the total over the line. Healey's gift didn't just close the gap. It changed what got built. Dupere said the extra funding allowed the crew to add an obstacle called a volcano, a transition ramp with a flat top shaped like an actual volcano, something that wouldn't have made it into the smaller version of the plan. Healey also pitched in on the asphalt removal himself.
Healey's reasoning for giving wasn't complicated. He saw the park as a rare spot where older and younger skaters mix, mentors alongside beginners, calling it "a great little circle down there."
Worth noting for anyone tracking the bigger picture: the skate park committee's own site still lists a longer-range fundraising goal of $500,000. Phase two is a real, finished milestone, but it's a step in a longer campaign, not the end of one.
The Four Thousand Square Feet That Just Opened
The addition itself sits in an older, worn-out section of the park that had been there since the original 1990s build, asphalt and a few crumbling prefab concrete ramps that had outlived their usefulness. A five-person crew from Dupere's company, Artisan Skateparks, tore out the old asphalt, laid a stone base, and poured new concrete the same way they'd approached phase one. The result is close to 4,000 square feet of new ramps and banks, the term skaters use for the slanted slopes built for tricks, plus the new volcano obstacle Healey's donation made possible.
The crew spent roughly three and a half weeks on this stretch. When the Newburyport News covered the project on August 8, Dupere expected the section to be skateable within days, as early as that coming Wednesday, August 12. That means this new stretch of Town Park has been open and in regular use for about three weeks now, weekday afternoons and weekend mornings included.
Town Park Is Bigger Than the Skate Park
If your last mental map of Town Park is just the ball fields and a playground, it's worth updating. The full facility at 140 Friend Street includes:
- A disc golf course
- A splash pad spray park
- Multiple diamond fields, including the Corner, Joe Packer, Lower, and Randall diamonds
- Basketball courts
- The Highland Street Field
- A band stand
- The Brian Eldredge Memorial Skate Park
It's one property doing a lot of different jobs at once, which is part of why the skate park's slow, donation-funded evolution has mattered to more than just skaters. A family showing up for the splash pad or a disc golf round is walking distance from watching a decade of community fundraising finally take concrete form.
Worth the Walk Over
What makes this story more than a ribbon-cutting is the math behind it. A memorial that started with one family's grief in 2018 turned into a $45,000 ask, then a $130,000 one, and it took a private donor from the next town over to close the gap on the second round before concrete could be poured. That's not how most municipal recreation projects get built, and it's a small but real window into how this city gets things done when the budget line doesn't stretch far enough on its own.
If you're the kind of person who notices these things about a place, who wants to live somewhere that fundraises for a skate park addition rather than letting it sit unfinished, Amesbury tends to keep giving you reasons to pay attention. The Barnes Team works this market block by block, and we track projects like this one because they tell you as much about a neighborhood as any listing sheet does. If you're curious what a home in this kind of town is actually worth right now, get your instant home valuation and let's talk about what's changing near you.
