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The Charles River Conservancy announced a $500,000 challenge grant from the Lynch Foundation for the Conservancy’s skate park project. The grant stipulates that the Lynch Foundation will mach other gifts at a 5-1 ratio. This major donation brings the total amount of money raised to just over $2million, significantly closer to the project’s $2.3 million fundraising goal.

Peter Lynch is still flipping for a new skateboarding park in Boston.

The Lynch Foundation, which is headed up by former Fidelity Investments manager Peter Lynch and his wife, Carolyn, is donating $500,000 to the nonprofit Charles River Conservancy (CRC) for the construction of a skateboard park under the Zakim Bridge.

Many would agree that public artist, Nancy Schon has already made her mark on the City of Boston. Her Make Way for Ducklings in the Public Garden and more recently, her Tortoise and the Hair in Copley Square attract and enchant locals and visitors of all ages. However, for Schon, a lifelong Newton resident, her real gift to Boston won’t come for another few years. Another sculpture? No. This time around, Schon looks forward to offering Boston and its guests a very different form of public art: a skateboard park.

Over in Waltham’s skatepark on moody Street, among teenagers in baggy jeans and hoodies performing ollies (that’s a trick where both a skateboard and a skateboarder end up in the air), you might sometimes find Reverend Richard Malmberg, pastor of the second Church, a United Christ Church, in Newton.

Supporters of the $2.3 million Charles River Skatepark have raised more than half of the cost of the project, which tourism officials say could be a regional magnet and attract marquee sporting events such as the X Games.

For more than a decade, the "Fenway trails" were the center of the local BMX scene. Lovingly maintained and legally questionable, the series of dirt jumps were built on an unused parcel of MBTA land next to the Fenway stop on the Green Line. On April 25, a backhoe arrived and leveled the mounds in a couple of hours.

It's not easy, being a skateboarder in Boston. The urban landscape might be a hard-edged heaven of granite and cement, but the skaters can tell they aren't welcome: Neighbors glare, businesses set up obstacles, and police constantly shoo them from the Copley. So it's revolutionary, in a way, the news that has been spreading through skate shops and the city's forbidden plazas. At the northern edge of the Central Artery Tunnel, in the shadow of the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, the state is offering a rare urban gift, a 40,000-square-foot concrete skate park, one of the largest in the country.