Unlike the rest of my blog, this post is not about one specific spot, like the Ditch or Lutherville, or even thematically grouped, like launch ramps or mini ramps. It is instead about two very different places, Towson and Lansdowne, and two very different styles of skating, street and concrete flow parks. I had considered splitting this up in to two separate posts but decided to keep it together because I find the juxtaposition of these two places interesting. While they are quite dissimilar, what they have in common is that, in my last two years of high school, both of them were frequent destinations. Once we were old enough to drive many more spots opened up to us. We visited other backyard mini…
Posts from the “Spots” Category
Growing up I must have spent at least several weeks a year in Ocean City, MD. My family owned a condo there so we went to the beach often. This makes Ocean City an odd place for me to write about as my experiences skateboarding there encompass the entire period covered in this blog. I went from tic-taccing in the parking lot while still in elementary school to board sliding handrails in my late teens. Yet my memories of the place have largely merged in to one continuous blur and it is exceptionally hard to differentiate what happened when. Saying we owned a condo makes my family sound wealthier than we were. My father, his two brothers and their mother (my paternal grandmother),…
If we had a scene that was specifically ours, it was backyard mini ramps. When I started high school in 1988, the vert ramp scene that had flourished up and down the east coast was on its way out. If you are interested, that scene is nicely documented over at House of Steam. In the late ’80s vert went out of fashion among the kids. The few backyard vert ramps still around were primarily skated by an older crowd. My high school years, 1988-1992, perfectly coincided with what was a major transition period in skateboarding. The release of The Search for Animal Chin in 1987 marks the apex of vert’s popularity. By the following year, street skating had begun to take prominence and the…
Denny Riordon was our local pro, owned our local skate shop and built our local skate park. I had initially planned to interview him about that skate park, Lutherville, but soon realized just how much more he had to offer on the history of east coast skateboarding. What I didn’t know, until doing this interview, is how much of a pioneer Denny was. He encompasses the entire history of modern skateboarding, from the rise of polyurethane wheels through to the present. I’m very proud to be able to present to you the following interview. Despite being such an important part of our local scene when I was growing up I now realize I don’t know very much about you. I know you lived…
This project has made me realize just how confused my personal chronology is. What I thought was a fairly accurate working timeline quickly fragmented under closer scrutiny. I have resorted to using certain events that I can place in time as markers or signposts, if you will. From those I can then extrapolate and make educated guesses about when, approximately, things happened. Of all the places I plan to write about, my memory of Lutherville is the most jumbled. Besides having trouble with the years I also realized that my understanding of how it came to be is based on rumor, hearsay and conjecture. I plan to interview Denny Riordon soon in the hopes of clearing some of this up. Denny was our local…
If I was to stay true to the “spots” theme this entry should really be titled “Launch Ramps”. Hell, even that is not very accurate. Maybe “Jeff B’s Driveway and in Front of Brian’s House”? How unwieldy is that? Team P.E.B. is much more evocative and fun. In elementary school I had a super hero club. Inspired by my favorite comic book, the X-Men, and a book of rare animals a relative had given me, I named our “team” the MAMMALS. Knowing myself, I am sure there was also some tortured acronym that MAMMALS was meant to stand for, but I can’t remember what. I assigned all of my friends code names based on animals best suited to their characteristics. I was, of…
I have a theory that you can never truly know a place unless you grow up there. I know this is not a particularly original idea, in fact I think I may have first encountered it in print in an old Stephen King novel, but it’s still an idea I developed independently so I’m laying claim to it. I think I first formalized this theory during my freshman year at college. I had moved out of state for school and that first year I did a fair amount of late night wandering around the surrounding neighborhoods. I quickly realized how little I knew about where I now lived. Live somewhere long enough as an adult and you can become familiar and comfortable with the…