As Playland at 43rd Avenue gets ready for its big opening day this Saturday, the skate area within the temporary park, known as Skateland, is attempting to drum up funds for its completion. In the next few weeks, the SF Skateboarding Association and Left Side Skateboards are hoping to raise $7,000 to complete the park.

“The city gave us a very small budget, which got us about halfway to completion,” Left Side Skateboards explains on the campaign's GoFundMe page.

Like Playland itself, Skateland is being built entirely by volunteers. Kids in the Outer Sunset first proposed the idea of a skate area at community meetings, and the project has seen strong support from the neighborhood.

With a few days to go before the park's opening, the project has raised $3,500, half of what it needs. One generous donor gave $1,000, saying, “Good job, everyone! You'll enjoy the skate park all the more since YOU built it.”

The major concern for the neighborhood was that the skate area would produce excessive noise. But architect and builder Justin Marks, an Outer Sunset resident who also worked on the Waller Street skate park in the Upper Haight, said that Skateland will be engineered to “be as quiet as possible.”

“When you roll up on the ramps, there’ll be a smooth transition,” he explains, cutting down on the clatter that can occur from wooden ramps. The area was built using Skatelite, a sleek, synthetic material that's also weatherproof, to help stand up to the neighborhood's unpredictable environment.

Skateland under construction. (Photo: Left Side Skateboards)

Skateland is also built to be modular: because Playland will be a temporary park, the pieces could potentially be disassembled and reused for another Pavement to Parks project. “We put extra effort into building something that could be used all over,” Marks told us.

After Skateland opens, it'll offer programming for youth skateboarding groups around San Francisco, including Rec & Parks’ own skate club, Shred N Butter, and the SF Skate Club. That's a useful addition in a period of overwhelming demand for children’s facilities and programs in San Francisco; a recent article in the Chronicle compared the difficulty of signing up for popular programs to getting a reservation at Michelin-starred State Bird Provisions.

Putting it together: volunteers at Skateland. (Photo: Left Side Skateboards)

“San Francisco is the Mecca of skateboarding,” he said. “The kids in the neighborhood deserve a nice skate park. We're creating an environment where kids can learn from their own peers.”

As a volunteer who is donating 100 percent of his time to Skateland to get it completed, Marks is excited about creating a new resource for the kids of the Outer Sunset.

To make a donation, visit Skateland's GoFundMe page.