Skatepunk

After writing all this stuff about my father (below), writing about skateboard parks seems somewhat trivial. But it's important to me, too, and so I plug on. As many of you know (you know, that avid six of you who read this) I spent a lot of time here discussing what I thought were the benefits of many types of skateparks, and spent some time arguing that certain types of parks were better for "skateboarding" than others. You can read those views below if you care, as well as my thoughts and hopes for the park I primarily designed, the etnies Skatepark of Lake Forest. That stuff is all in October's rants, just scroll down.

Now Playing: Bob Dylan's Bootleg Box Set. Awesome. Thanks, Dave Hoang!

Anyway, the park that sits 200 yards down the hill from my office, sucks. It doesn't suck because it's poorly built, or because it's too expensive (it's free, thanks to my company's donation), or because there are too many kids, or even because you need to wear pads (although that does really suck). It sucks because the environment is absolutely no fun for skateboarding. It's like a prison: think black fence, security cameras everywhere, five guards watching every move everyone makes, and a constant big brother voice on the loudspeaker that says, "Johnny, your mom is in the parking lot." Or, "Sir, please don't hang your sweatshirt on the fence, that's not allowed." Or, "If you're not skateboarding you need to leave the skatepark." They've managed to take what a lot of people see as the best park in the area and turn it into the worst. The kids would rather go to crappy Laguna Hills or Huntington or skate anything rather than go to the etnies prison of Lake Forest. I'm very sad for the kids in the area who will either soon tire of the park, or who will think that that kind of completely stale environment is what skateboarding is all about. Because it's not, and although I'm proud of my work designing the park, it's all for nothing, because the city has taken something based on freedom and turned it into crap, when they had a choice. They don't have to make it this way, they choose to, and they blame it on their constituents, which is crap. It makes me very sad.

Skatepark? No Thanks... Check Out