Since he was a child of six or seven, Lyle Rosenthal has been an avid skateboarder.
Rosenthal, 21, fell in love with the sport young, but growing up in Cherry Hill, there was nowhere for him to ride with other skaters.
“I was obsessed, but I had nowhere to go,” he said.
“I was so badly craving the community I saw on the Internet.”
So his mother, Marla Rosenthal, encouraged Lyle to began petitioning her local and county governments to construct a skatepark.
She coached him to advocate for the amenity, helped him organize others who supported it, and put in no shortage of hours herself doing the same.
“At first it was nothing but excitement,” Lyle remembers. “As we got further into it, petitions got signed; we tried and tried.
“I had a lot of nights when my mom said, “This might not happen. It’s not looking good, but we’re going to keep trying,” he said.
On Tuesday afternoon, some 15 years later, Lyle and Marla joined those same government officials at the site of the future Camden County Skatepark, ceremonially putting shovels in the ground to celebrate the kickoff of its construction.
“No one has been more enthusiastic” than Marla Rosenthal in her advocacy, said Camden County Commissioner Jeff Nash, liaison to the county parks department.
“Persistent she was because she needed to be,” Nash said, “because she was representing a community of skateboarders.”
The commissioner described Cherry Hill as “one of the founding jurisdictions of skateboarding,” an allusion to the short-lived but well-remembered Cherry Hill Skatepark of the 1980s.
As the pastime remains “enormously popular,” Nash said, “what better place to reopen than Cherry Hill Township?
“This is going to be a great amenity for the Camden County Parks System,” he said.
Situated on the banks of the Cooper River on North Park Drive in Cherry Hill, the skatepark will be flanked by the new Camden County Pooch Park and the county Winterfest seasonal ice skating rink.
It will be built by Seacoast Construction of East Brunswick, with technical assistance by skatepark designers Spohn Ranch Skateparks of Los Angeles, California.
Its $913,410 cost was contemplated in the $100-million Camden County “Parks Alive 2025” initiative, and will be offset by an $87,000 Local Recreation Improvement Grant from the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs.
Camden County Parks officials expect to be cutting the ribbon on the skatepark within two to three months.
For Lyle, celebrating a day he thought he might never see come alongside the people who made it possible, yielded a moment full of gratitude and rejoicing.
“I couldn’t have done it without my mother,” he said. “She was my biggest supporter. I’m very grateful to anybody who had anything to do with this.”
Asked about his hopes for what the skatepark might become with time, Lyle said he’s like to see it grow to host “consistent jams,” where skaters can showcase their skillsets.
More than that, he’s excited to see younger skaters hone their skills and build relationships with other people in their community.
“It was a great time for everybody to say, ‘We want this. We can get this done,’” he said. “I’m excited to see people get creative in the park.”
As for the persistence that saw him maintaining hope as he waited for the park to materialize, Lyle echoed a remark that will be familiar to any skater.
“[People said] it’s never gonna happen; they’re wrong,” he said. “Skateboarders are the most resilient. They throw themselves on the concrete all day long.”
