Justin Garcia
A demolition team brought a tractor to Turtle Ditch on Friday to continue dismantling the former skate spot.
What was once an empty ditch in downtown Tampa became a paradise for street skaters over the past 20 years. Now, it's being demolished.
Turtle Ditch, a concrete snaking pathway that begins at 1015 E Whiting St. and carves its way toward the railroad tracks that separate Channelside and Downtown, is in ruins. A construction company has removed most of the ledges, transitions and ramps that skaters built on the property. Debris and chunks of concrete rest on top of the graffiti that remains on the sections of the ditch.
The city has not confirmed who purchased the property, but demolition workers at the site speculated that a private company bought it.
Over the past two decades, Turtle Ditch had become an iconic spot that local skaters frequented. And at times the pros, including some from the Nike SB team, went there to get a taste of Tampa street skating.
Rob Meronek, local skater and co-owner of The Boardr Skateboarding and BMX Events Company, remembers going there in the early 2000s to skate with friends. His crew and other skaters started making small adjustments to it.
One of the first additions he remembers being added to Turtle Ditch was a concrete transition across a round manhole cover that juts out of the side of the ditch. The manhole is the reason for the name turtle ditch, because it is shaped like a turtle shell.
Other skaters got involved, too, and built small ledges to grind on. But the city would often remove those additions in a matter of days.
"We were like, 'holy shit, people actually care about this?'" Meronek told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
Nevertheless, they kept making the ditch more fun, and at one point even had a satellite dish propped up on the side of the ditch that they'd skate on.
Meronek has many fond memories with friends at Turtle Ditch, "It was perfect for old dudes like me, or young dudes who rip," he said. But on "Go Skating Day" in 2006, the Tampa Police Department rained on their parade.
Photos from that day show Meronek and two of his fellow skaters in handcuffs sitting in the ditch, with police officers looking down at them. He said the police had told them they were trespassing and slapped the shackles on them. One photo shows a police officer with what Meronek said was "either a taser or a gun" pulled out to his side while all the skaters were on the ground.
They were ticketed for trespassing and released. Meronek had to go to court, which he documented with a digital camera and uploaded to YouTube. He had to pay a $600 fine. He skated to and from court and, "wore a shirt with a big blunt on it in the courtroom," he said.
Over the years since Meronek started skating there, the spot changed. It gained an official Google Maps location called "Turtle Ditch DIY Skatepark." And it grew.
Larger ledges and small bowls were added to the edges of the ditch. Eventually, it became a full-blown underground mini-skatepark.
"In the past year, a group of locals who are hyped on building DIY went buck," Meronek said.
One of those locals who built a lot of the new additions is local skater Scott Bentley, whose day job is running Bentley Salon, which he owns. He and members of his skate crew "Seminole Heights Motherfucker," along with people from the 10x30 Skate Shop, spent hundreds hours building the site up to become what it was before the demolition began.
“It was beyond a bunch of punks building something out of defiance," Bentley told CL. "It’s taking a wasteland and making something useable and beautiful,” he said.
Bentley has spent decades skating in Tampa and building up DIY skate spots out of wayward locations, including slaughterhouses. He had skated at Turtle Ditch for around the same amount of time as Meronek, but had always thought it "kind of sucked." Last year, he saw that something more could be built out of the area.
Before building anything, they had to clean up needles, beer cans, underwear and other debris out of the area. They spent hundreds of hours since last March doing the hard construction work, sometimes spending 13 hour volunteer work days to add new features to the skatepark.
"It became a place where families would come to skate, and we even had people who were seeing the place for the first time donate to help build it," Bentley said. He estimated that about $10,000 was invested into Turtle Ditch over the past year; Bentley only had to contribute a couple hundred bucks, the rest was donated.
Bentley said he had a very different interaction than Meronek with law enforcement when he was caught building at Turtle Ditch last year.
"I explained what we were doing, and what a positive impact it had on the community, and he let me continue on," he said.
He pointed out that this interaction shows how much the public's attitude has changed toward skaters since Meronek was arrested in 2006.
Despite Bentley's positive interactions over the past year, Turtle Ditch is on its way out, as construction crews continue demolition.
People from all around the country and the world bemoaned the destruction on his Instagram post about it, but he said the biggest hurt was his own son's sadness at the loss of Turtle Ditch.
He's considering approaching city council, to petition for a public, free, DIY skatepark similar to the famed Lot 11 Skatepark in Miami.
There are other DIY skate spots emerging around Tampa, but the skaters CL talked to didn't feel like putting them in the spotlight after the recent destruction of the iconic Turtle Ditch.
Since the inception of Turtle Ditch, skating has gone from outsider to more mainstream, with the sport making its Olympic debut in 2020. Still, Meronek feels that skating is continuing to forge its path in mainstream society.
"Even after all these years, it's just still not as accepted as other sports," Meronek said. "But DIY skating spots will never disappear, they will always find a place to exist."
