Vancouver Would Be Cooler If is a column that advocates for things that either exist in other cities and/or could otherwise serve to improve and celebrate life in our own.

Although Vancouver has a rich skateboarding community, for a city famous for its rain, we have an obvious lack of safe, dry places to skate. Leeside is dope, but it’s not beginner friendly, and it’s really only “covered” (not “indoor”); whereas the Vancouver Skateboard Coalition’s travelling “Green Ramp” is beginner friendly (and open to younger skaters), but they haven’t been able to secure a permanent space to call home.

Don’t get us wrong – we’re immensely thankful for what we’ve got here in Vancouver and are super proud of the people who put in the hard work to make our skate community so vibrant (hat tip to Antisocial Skateboard Shop, Vancouver Skateboard Coalition, Late Bloomers Skate Club, Chickflip, and Takeover Skateboarding, to name a few). But in the rainy months, we just can’t shake the thought that Vancouver would be cooler if we had more safe, all-inclusive and dry places to skate year-round…like St. Louis, Missouri’s Sk8 Liborius.

Its vaulted ceilings may have once carried the tenors and altos of Catholic choirboys, but nowadays the acoustics of the abandoned St. Liborius Church have been repurposed to carry the screeches and echoes characteristic of a DIY Skatepark. (If you’re a skater, or someone who’s interested in architecture, city planning, community building and/or keeping up with cool things happening around the world, you may already be familiar with this project, which started making the internet rounds back in 2018 – check this cool Atlas Obscura article – but it’s always good to appreciate what people can accomplish when they work together – without City Hall in the way.)

We’ll admit, the Catholic-church-to-inclusive-skate-spot pipeline isn’t exactly a straight shot. In the case of Sk8 Liborius, the building spent its first one-hundred-and-thirty-something years as a convent, before being deconsecrated to serve the public for a short tenure as a homeless shelter (subsequently shut down); then became the de facto local venue for underground shows, and eventually fell into the hands of a team of co-owners who renovated and transformed the space into a juvenile delinquent’s wet dream (an opportunity to shred and pop nollies in church).

But back to Vancouver: abandoned churches don’t exactly spring out of the ground, and we’re not suggesting that anyone try to take one over by hippie-jumping over the pews or heel-flipping down the altar steps to a chorus of Dinosaur Jr., but it wouldn’t be offside to suggest that having a skate-able indoor space in the city would be met with nearly holy reverence.

Get inspired! Check the documentary below: