Written by Gary:

ok so heres the story. Somewhere in early 2008 I felt I was getting really old and my life was meaningless. I decided to drop everything and pursue one of my dreams and do something good for skateboarding in Singapore.

When I was a kid I wished there was an indoor skatepark I could go to when it rained and I remember how sad it was when it rained pretty much everyday. Back then I didn’t even have a cat to chill with.

Anyway, my best friend Barry who I met through skateboarding had just come back from university overseas and with his help and some borrowed money, I realized I could make this happen for real.

Since Barry was a Dude in the local skateboarding scene and was good with people, he handled the PR and communications, while I being a nerd worked in the background to set the technical stuff up.

I made a deal with FICO Sports Hub in Jurong West to lease some land to build a big 13,000 sq feet skatepark. Long story short, after I spent lots of money buying the structure and equipment, FICO ran into some problems with their landlord and our approval to start construction was put on hold indefinitely.

That was a year long wait before we realized it probably would never happen since they were embroiled in a lawsuit with their landlord with no resolution in sight. Fed up, I decided to cut our losses and make a mini skatepark inside a shophouse at the bottom of Sixth Avenue along Bukit Timah Road.

That project was a fiasco, the rent was very high in that area, and we had tons of noise complaints from our neighbors. We never made enough money to cover what we spent renovating the place, and eventually we were served a notice from the authorities to get out.

We had lots of fun times there even though it was only a couple of months. Those were definitely some of the best times in my life with the crazy skating and the funniest jokes/pranks, especially with old friends Stef, Paul and John who helped us lots.

However lots of times it also got pretty stressful for me and Barry since we were losing money the whole time, and there were disagreements over the way I was running things. We realized that we had very different goals in life, and so with the termination of miniLSP, Barry left to pursue his own dreams.

During all this time, LSP had built up a big enough following thanks to Barry, and that encouraged me to try one more time to make it work. Luck seemed to be on my side this time, who would have guessed that an ideal location was just across the road!

In November 2009, the new LSP was made inside Horsecity, which is home to many sports and recreational facilities inside converted horse stables. Though the rent wasn’t much lower, we did have a larger and better space. We had loads of fun there but eventually the number of skaters coming down to skate started to decrease. We renovated the place in 2011 hoping to increase the numbers but it continued to fall. It came to a point where we felt LSP wasn’t really needed much anymore so we decided to shut the place down on 31 July 2011.

Even though we again lost a lot of money there, we had super fun times and I would have done it all again if I traveled back in the past. Now though, with more public skateparks opening in Singapore, and especially a partially sheltered one at the trendy SCAPE mall, LSP is less relevant and I do not believe we could make a private skatepark sustainable.

We will however continue to sell skateboard product online until we find a new location for a skateboard shop. Since we cannot contribute to the skates scene with a skatepark, our goal now is to increase our efforts in supporting for local talents with sponsorship and sweet skate videos.

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Between all this, in 2010 we started selling longboards and in early 2011 we opened a dedicated longboarding shop known as Longboard Love. It is intentionally located near the best hills in Singapore and is run by longboarders, for longboarders. For more info, http://www.loveskatepark.com/longboard/

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