The new concrete at Town Park is still darker than the rest of the slab, the kind of gray that hasn't had a full season of skateboard wheels and New England weather to lighten it up yet. Roll up to the back wall on a weekday afternoon and you'll see kids testing the newest addition, a transition ramp with a flat top shaped like an actual volcano, dropping in and rolling out while a few older skaters wait their turn along the edge. It went in this past August. By now it's had about a month of regular local traffic.
What most people rolling through Town Park this month don't realize is that this isn't the second version of this skate park. It's the third.
Before It Was Concrete, It Was Tennis Courts and Scrap Wood
Long before Amesbury had a skate park at all, kids were dragging plywood ramps onto the old tennis courts at Town Park and building their own setup out of whatever they could find. That was the 1980s version: no city funding, no design firm, just teenagers improvising a place to skate because nowhere else existed. By the mid-1990s, the city paved over the cracked courts with fresh asphalt and gave Amesbury its first real skate park, built the way most small towns did it back then, with a generic prefab kit from an outside construction company.
That asphalt park is where Tom Dupere learned to skate. He's spent roughly 30 years on that same patch of ground, and he's not watching this latest rebuild from the sidelines. He's the one pouring the concrete. Dupere now designs and builds skate parks professionally through Artisan Skateparks, and the current three-phase reconstruction of Town Park's skate park, the one that just added the volcano, is his design.
That's the detail the wire coverage of this summer's milestone tends to skip past. This isn't a case of the city hiring an outside firm to modernize a tired amenity. It's a guy who grew up riding a prefab asphalt park in the 1990s coming back to pour a proper concrete one for the kids who'll spend their own 30 years on it next.
Named for a Skater Who Grew Up Here
The park carries the name Brian Eldredge Memorial Skate Park, after a local skater who died from pancreatitis in May 2018 at age 29. His mother, Donna Eldredge, spent close to three years working with the Amesbury Improvement Association afterward, raising roughly $80,000 to rebuild the center of the park and rename it in his honor. That first phase started construction in late 2020 and opened to skaters in the spring of 2021, timed to hit right around April school vacation.
Three years of fundraising for one phase gives you a sense of the pace these projects actually move at in a city this size. Public skate parks don't get built out of a single grant or a line item in the city budget. They get built brick by brick, literally in some cases, since the park has also sold personalized memorial bricks to help fund construction. Progress depends on how much a small committee can raise, one dedication night and one fundraiser at a time.
Why Phase Two Almost Didn't Happen the Way It Did
After phase one wrapped, the Brian Eldredge Memorial Skate Park Committee set a $130,000 goal for phase two, the section that just opened. For a while, they came up short of that number and had already sketched a scaled-back design to match what they had. Then Merrimac-based philanthropist Dan Healey made a donation that pushed the campaign over the line, and according to Dupere, that single contribution changed the design enough to add the volcano and cover extra asphalt removal that wouldn't have otherwise been in the budget.
Healey has said the park matters to him because of what it represents for the town, calling it a spot where different generations of skaters, from beginners to mentors, share the same ground. That's not a throwaway line. It maps onto exactly what the physical layout has become: a crew of five, including Dupere, spent about three and a half weeks this August tearing out the old asphalt and crumbling prefab ramps in that back section, laying stone, and pouring roughly 4,000 square feet of new concrete, ramps, and the sloped obstacles skaters call banks. The whole addition follows the same build process phase one used, poured in place rather than trucked in prefabricated.
The Fundraiser That's Already on the Calendar
None of this happens in isolation from the rest of Amesbury's summer calendar. Amesbury Days, the city's long-running summer festival, has folded an annual Game of SKATE night into its lineup at the amphitheater, co-hosted with Flatbread Company Amesbury, with proceeds going straight to the skate park committee. It's a small event on paper, one night of a skate competition and a pizza partnership, but it's part of the same fabric that raised the $80,000 for phase one and helped close the gap on phase two's $130,000 target. If you've been to a Flatbread fundraiser night at the amphitheater without realizing where the money went, this is where it went.
The Volcano Isn't the Last Chapter
Here's the part that changes how you should read this summer's milestone. The park's own site already has a dedicated page for phase three, and the current fundraising goal listed there runs to $500,000. That's a number that dwarfs what it took to build phases one and two combined. Whatever gets built next won't be a quick add-on. It'll take its own multi-year campaign, its own version of a Dan Healey stepping in at the right moment, its own crew spending a few weeks in some future August pouring concrete over what's left of the old asphalt.
That's really the story underneath the story here. Every version of this park, from the plywood ramps on the tennis courts to the prefab asphalt of the 1990s to the phased concrete rebuild happening now, has been built by people who didn't leave. Dupere didn't move away and forget the park he grew up riding. Donna Eldredge didn't let her son's connection to that same asphalt fade once he was gone. The committee didn't disband when phase two's fundraising stalled below goal. Somebody kept showing up, and eventually somebody like Healey wrote a check big enough to unstick things.
If you've lived in Amesbury long enough to remember the old asphalt version of this park, or long enough to have skated it yourself, the volcano isn't really the news. The news is that this half-acre off Friend Street keeps finding people willing to rebuild it, one phase and one generation at a time, and there's already a page on the internet asking for help with the next one.
If you're weighing what makes a place worth putting down roots in, this kind of continuity is worth more than it sounds like on paper. It's one small, specific example of what keeps happening across Amesbury: people who grew up here sticking around long enough to hand something better to whoever comes next.
If you're curious what else is shifting in this city, from the housing stock to the streets these projects sit on, The Barnes Team tracks Amesbury closely and can walk you through what's actually happening on the ground. Reach out anytime for a conversation about the neighborhood, no pressure, no pitch required.
