In its new home, Flower Skate Shop looks to grow skateboarding in Syracuse

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Flower Skate Shop first opened in downtown Syracuse in October 2020 as a project between five local skateboarders who wanted to engage with the city’s skating community. However, when the business started growing, co-owners Charlie Giancola, John More and Drew Shoup decided they needed a new place to call home.

“We’re opening up the new Flower,” Giancola said. “A sprouting flower out of the basement from whence we came.”

Flower Skate Shop’s new location opened last Saturday on Walton Street in Armory Square. With the new spacious location, the shop’s owners plan to grow the city’s skateboarding culture by hosting skateboarding events and engaging in partnerships with other local businesses.

“It’s been a long journey,” Giancola said. “It’s been three years of grinding and we were starting to finally have the success we were hoping for at the old spot.”

However, once they found that success, the owners were informed about properties near Armory Square. After a few weeks of deliberating, the owners decided to pull the trigger, finally settling on their current location still in downtown Syracuse, as Giancola wanted.

The owners spent months working to construct most of the cabinets, shelves and racks themselves. Inside the shop, one wall is lined with skateboards from local board brands, like Wool Skateboards, along with larger national brands like Violet and Theories.

Alexander Zhiltsov | Contributing Photographer

Shop customers test their skills on a mini ramp inside of Flower Skate Shop. Shop owners invited people to bring their own skateboards, get a tattoo in the back of the store and indulge in free food.

Apparel, including some of Flower’s own branded merchandise, and accessories fill up the counters and racks. However the store’s centerpiece is its mini-ramp assembled by Mike Lewis, a friend of the owners.

“Everything like the counters and the display cabinets and stuff took a little bit of time to do,” Giancola said. “The ramp got put together in no time because he’s built so many of them. (Lewis) didn’t look at any drawings or anything, he just knew what to do.”

To celebrate the shop’s recent opening, the owners invited Syracusans to bring their skateboards to the shop, skate on the mini-ramp and even get a tattoo in the back of the shop.

For skateboarder Tyler Sullivan, the new shop’s opening was just the reason he needed to come up from his home in New Jersey to buy a skateboard and support his friend Sean Morgan, who was giving tattoos for the opening day.

Of course, the mini-ramp helped too.

“Tattoo shop and skate shop, it goes hand and hand,” Sullivan said. “It’s worth the four-hour drive for sure.”

The mini-ramp is just a sign of things to come, though, for Flower Skate Shop. Co-owner More hopes their new storefront will continue the growth Flower has experienced over the past few years and wants their next step to be making an indoor skatepark.

“I hope that the space might have (the city) take us a little more seriously, too,” Giancola said. “It’s just little goals like that, just expanding skateboarding around here and having art shows and then bringing it to the public.”

The shop’s owners hope that by building a relationship with the city, officials will be more willing to build a new skatepark in Syracuse. Oswego and Auburn have already gotten new skateparks in the past two years, More said. Syracuse has a handful of skate parks, such as East Woods Skate Plaza and Onondaga Lake Skatepark.

Flower’s owners also want to keep the city’s skateboarding community vibrant and consistent.

“(We want) to try to help get skateparks promoted and to get built and keep the activity alive and get more people into the scene and get them into skating,” More said. “Keep doing what we have been doing…promoting skateboarding and keeping people skateboarding, and get the people who used to skate back in skateboarding.”