Skate Nation

Over the next six months, Ryan and I held a series of workshops with the young skaters of Elizabeth to come up with a design that integrated custom aboveground ramps with small concrete elements like ledges and stairs. The trick to putting together a good skatepark is to organize all of the obstacles in such a way that they can be hit in a series, in what skaters call "flow" or "lines." Creating good flow on paper isn't easy, especially for skateboarders who are used to perceiving things in a three-dimensional realm, so Ryan and I chalked out the entire plan to scale in an empty parking lot and rode our boards between the obstacles, making adjustments based on distance and speed. In order to stay within the town's budget, we maximized the flow to ensure that skaters would have more options with fewer ramps, and molded the skatepark's footprint to the surrounding park.

"Oh, man," boggled a fourteen-year-old skater at a workshop where we unfurled our plans. Up to that point, his most elaborate terrain had been the curb behind Safeway. "Oh, man, this is going to be so awesome."

Then, not long before our design was to go out for a construction bid, we learned that Elizabeth had hired a new parks-and-rec director named Joel Johnson. Although he admitted he knew nothing about skateboarding and had never before worked on a skatepark project, Johnson said he was concerned about the lack of "lanes" in our design. We tried to explain the concept of flow, but he didn't buy it. And Johnson's first move as director was to scrap our design in favor of a more comprehensible one by a company with a track record: Skateparks International.

We unceremoniously buried Urban Creation not long after. Last I heard, Ryan was off in California and had ditched architecture for the skateboarder's only true calling: deconstruction.

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Over the past four years, more public skateboard parks have been built in the United States than in the past three decades. Christian Hosoi, skateboarding's high-flying superstar of the '80s, thinks the current boom is part of the natural evolution of a sport that needed to return to its roots. "The soul of the sport came from pools and concrete skateparks," he says, "and now it's coming back."

It makes sense, then, that this evolutionary stage was sparked not by civic officials or corporate entrepreneurs, but by Mark "Red" Scott and Monk Hubbard working in a trash-filled lot below a freeway in Portland, Oregon, back in 1990.

By Hubbard's account, they just wanted a place to skate -- so instead of crying to the city and waiting for years for someone to do something, they started building it for themselves. Lacking both official funds and authorization, the grubby skaters used concrete left over from their various construction jobs to mold banks below the Burnside Street bridge. Learning by trial and error, they constructed bowls and quarter-pipes, working them into the bridge's pillars.

In 1992, Hubbard attempted a similar project below a bridge in Seattle, using skills he'd learned while building commercial swimming pools to stealthily dig a peanut-shaped bowl. But before the concrete could be poured, a nearby resident called the cops. Busted, Hubbard and his crew were ticketed and forced to refill their handiwork.

In the meantime, the Burnside Street park, once a shooting gallery for drug addicts, was on its way to becoming the most famous skatepark in the world. Though still technically illegal, Burnside was formally recognized by Portland in the late '90s. Today it's featured as a level on the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game, and it's often cited by architecture magazines as a testament to grassroots urban reclamation and the do-it-yourself skateboarder ethos.

The next leap forward in concrete skatepark construction came in 1996, in the unlikely location of Crested Butte, Colorado. Hubbard and Scott were brought in by local skaters to aid the makeshift crew that would later turn into Team Pain's original concrete squad. Tim Altic, a Telluride skater, drove over to help with the labor and compare notes on concrete work.

Altic has been designing concrete skateparks since the '70s, mostly in Europe, and likens it to writing or playing music. All three acts are specific and technical but rooted in intuitive knowledge. "A crew of skaters is going to manipulate the design to have better rhythm," he says. "They're going to change things to make it good skating. Somebody who doesn't skate can't make that decision; they have to follow the plan."

Coming in $10,000 below Crested Butte's $50,000 budget, the crew smoothed out an immense, eleven-foot-deep bowl that Sk8parklist.com calls "a rusty grandfather of today's concrete masterpieces." Soon after, Altic completed designs for Fort Collins, Team Pain got jobs in a number of Colorado mountain towns, and Hubbard and Scott began several projects along the Oregon coast, most notably the 30,000-square-foot Newberg skatepark.