Pair planning their own twist on skate park
They are two dads, both teachers, both businessmen and now partners planning to build an indoor skate park on Rochester’s east side.
“Both of us are in it because of our kids,” said Ed Mineck, 55, who saw his son’s academics and behavior improve after the 15-year-old got into BMX two years ago. “Neither of us has a dream to build a skate park.”
And that is why Mineck and Tony Britt, 36, think their Rochester Action Sports Park, or RASP, will succeed where others have failed. The area’s last indoor park, X-Dreams in East Rochester, closed last spring.
RASP — open to skateboarders, inline skaters, BMX riders, mountain bikers — would have ramps, a track, box jumps and be slightly larger than X-Dreams.
The park is envisioned to fill 20,000 square feet of a towering old warehouse on University Avenue near Blossom Road, built shortly after 1910 as an extension of the Rochester Last Works shoe factory that soon became part of the Symington multi-campus war effort as an ordnance plant.
The space, with ceilings up to 60 feet high, would offer areas for beginners, intermediate riders and experts, a parents’ lounge, snacks for sale and an apparel shop.
Mineck and Britt received city Planning Commission approval this week. Before work can begin, however, they need at least $100,000 in capital, in addition to the $120,000 Mineck has personally committed, records show. The hope is to find sponsors, whose logos would then adorn park structures.
RASP could open in January, and they expect the business to be cash flow positive and profitable by year two.
The key is to avoid the pitfalls of other failed parks — letting riders in free, allowing the facility to become too familiar and stale, not planning for the summer when kids can ride outside for free. Still, most parks are opened by fans or participants in the sport and know what riders want.
“We don’t pretend to know how to design this park,” Britt said. “We don’t pretend to know what kids are going to want … We’re teachers. We know how to manage people.”
Mineck, a professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology, used to have a commercial printing business.
Britt, who teaches in the Webster school district, is the Spry Middle School skate and BMX adviser and has a landscaping and snowplowing business. He used to ride BMX as a teenager, and started again as his three boys, ages 7, 5 and 4, got interested. He got to know Mineck’s son, riding at X-Dreams, before he knew Mineck.
They have turned to Kink, a worldwide freestyle BMX company, and Blackout Distributors, both based in Rochester with employees well traveled in bike parks, to help with design. People like Bobby Parker, 27, a Blackout sales rep, who grew up in the Midwest and has been riding motocross for more than 10 years.
“Last weekend, I drove four hours to go ride a different skate park that had 200 people in it,” Parker said, even though there are other indoor parks in Ithaca and Buffalo.
Like X-Dreams, RASP can draw not just local riders but those from across the Northeast. The park will have ramps that X-Dreams didn’t. What Parker likes is that the park will cater to beginners and experts alike, have classes, summer camps, after-school programs and a layout where ramps can be changed to keep it fresh.
As for merchandise, Mineck and Britt plan to buy local, maybe even create their own apparel line.
“They have definitely thought a lot of stuff out,” said Parker. “I felt they were going at it with all the right reasons. … If this community got behind this, it would be nothing but positive.”
BDSHARP@DemocratandChronicle.com
To learn more
E-mail Ed Mineck and Tony Britt at RochesterActionSportsPark@Frontier.com
