A Sad Update on the Bridge

The Bridge is the spiritual epicenter of street skating in Taipei. First, the city fenced it off for a year, but let us skate in it during controlled hours. Then, a month ago, they shut it down for "plumbing repairs." It was scheduled to reopen on October 1st, but now it's been delayed at least another month. Nothing seems to have happened at the site. Taking the Bridge away from us has been a bit like kicking out the homeless people from Main Station; tossing their boxes and posessions without warning adn sending them alone out into the streets. We didn't have much here, or ask for it, just a place to be.  We (not me, other, more devoted people) payed for it and built it and maintained it. OK, I bought some cement bags and tried to patch some shit, but I'm tooting my own feeble horn. Truth is, a core of devoted life long skaters built and maintained a DIY in the middle of hte city and it became a haven, a kabaa, for skating, and now I'm starting the think the city is slyly trying to take it away, delay by delay. There is no reason we couldn't have been skating there for the last month. Or any reason to fence it all off to start with. At first, we just shrugged it off, and laughed. More street sessions for us. But the truth is, Taipei skating needs the Bridge. There is are two parks here, inaccessible for most, and filled to the brim with 4 year olds on push bikes, but even if they were skate only, they'd still be terribly designed and built even worse. If the Bridge really doesnt work for the city, I hope we can all find a suitable solution somewhere else. Otherwise, skateboarding is giong to spread out across the city like a metasticizing cancer and kill the whole thing.