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Sean Cullen just wanted the people of Woodstock to stop letting their dogs crap in his yard. “Every day, you’d find 20 more [droppings] out here,” he recalls. “It was a big stinking mess.” Cullen figured the best way to discourage loitering in the alley behind his rented home was to show the area was being maintained. The sidewalk that ran along the gravel road was a cracked, jagged path to nowhere. The obvious solution? Build a concrete skate bowl corner.
Maybe not obvious to most people. But Cullen, 46, has been a professional in-line skater for the better part of three decades; a mythic figure in the California blading scene, he says he once qualified for the X Games, and posts clips of his tricks under the name “Sean Sea.” So, beginning last August, he installed features that he wanted to skate: a grind box, two waves, and a quarter pipe. He kept the egress for pedestrians—in fact, the block is more walkable than it was before—but passersby now walk down the center of a DIY skatepark.
Board-riding kids started appearing from the neighborhoods along Southeast Woodstock Boulevard; they dubbed the place Appletree Park. Cullen describes the project as “my unique style of urban property maintenance” and says it took him more than 100 sessions, 12 hours each, of stacking rocks and pouring concrete. “I’ve tried to get my friends to help, but nobody wants to do concrete work for free,” he says. “It is a real bitch when it’s just you. I don’t regret it at all, though. It’s been awesome having cool stuff to skate right next to my pad.”
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2026 here!
