I hooked up with House of Neil and his friend Mark to skate one of the newer concrete parks in Chicagoland. Northbrook is also a well off suburb, and they took a different approach to building a skatepark for their community. It’s part of a massive athletic complex that you pretty much have to drive to get to. There’s baseball fields, batting cages, soccer fields, a golf course and a fishing pond. You can even get pole on loan from the golf pro shop if you want to drop a line in. So theyt spent some money on this park, but how does it skate?

My sister said there was a skatepark by her house. I asked her if it was concrete and she said it was. I drove over to check it out. There was a lot of concrete, a big slab of it sitting under some prefab ramps. Metal frames with some sort of black masonite-type surface that was delamming like waxy masoninte left out in the rain. I made my way past the high school lurkers with their longboards loitering under the shelter and entered the park. The slab of concrete was indeed massive, dwarfing the paltry selection of ramps. They had a nice miniramp though, maybe 4 feet tall and at least 24 feet wide. I dropped in and did a 50-50. My axles got unnaturally squirrelly and I almost wilsoned. The coping was slippery as snot. Someone had waxed the hell out of it. I rubbed my shoe on the coping and big cornflake size pieces came off. Absurd. I spent 10 minutes trying to clean off the coping and took a couple runs, but there were some slick spots on the surface from residual wax I’m sure. A shame. You don’t see many miniramps that wide. Kids on scooters…

Not completely out of touch with what the Members sang about, but in this case it’s the “Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk” sound of wheels rolling over the metal plates of prefab ramps in suburban Chicago. I skated my former hometown’s Centennial Park Skate Facility in Naperville Illinois. It’s about 4 years old and prefab, so I was expecting the worst. The surface was in surprisingly good shape given the weather extremes in the Chicago area, have I been mislead about the evils of prefab? No, it turns out they are replacing the surface annually, according to one local. So much for saving money by going prefab.

I’m in the burbs of Chicago for about a week for my grandmother’s 90th birthday. I didn’t get a chance to get anything scheduled before I left, so the updates from yours truly are going to be infrequent and brief. If any of the other contributors want to stage a coup and step up the posts, now’s the time. What’s the picture relevance? Those are vintage Chicago Trucks, harder to find a decent picture of than I thought. Couldn’t score a close up. Left: Current eBay auction. Right: A Bahne setup with Chicago Trucks via Surfa Sam’s 2005 Australian eBay report. I’m in Naperville, actually. Since I last visited there is supposedly a new concrete skatepark in addition to downtown’s prefab park. I’m going to check them both out, but let’s face it, I’m not going to hold my breath.

You’ve seen it under construction, and now here’s the newly/nearly finished Modern Skate & Surf skatepark in suburban Detroit (Royal Oak), Michigan. Now you may ask yourself, where is my beautiful house? Does Skate and Annoy have some sort of unholy arrangement with Team Pain? The answer is no, it’s just that Tito is kind enough keep us supplied.

More pics from Team Pain showing Colorado Springs concrete work in progress. There’s some pretty cool looking tile in some of them. Come on Tito, make with the close ups!

I think England built a lot of public parks in the 70’s and instead of bulldozing the outdoor ones after the bust, they just left them to rot in the elements. House of Neil, can I get a confirmation? The Hackney Bumps is a 70’s era skatespot in London that is still going. There’s an event called the Hackney Olympics that takes place with some regularity. It seems like it might be a localized and smaller version of Skatopia. This year’s Olympics are on August 9th. My favorite quote from the web site: Some people still claim that they can’t find HACKNEY BUMPS. I find this remarkable. Some people also claim that you will get killed when you go to HACKNEY BUMPS. That is not really true, though the kids that burnt the vespa and the (motor)bikes on the photos above DID have REAL guns, though they could not care less about the skateboarders… Video and flyer after the jump. – Thanks to Tony Gunnarsson for the tip.

No, this is not just an excuse to see how many classic post punk album covers I can (in this case, poorly) Photoshop that yellow skateboard into. There’s a community meeting for Miami Beach residents about renovating and enhancing some public facilities. One thing on the agenda is a “new cultural multi-purpose skate plaza.” No thanks, I prefer my skate plazas to be culture-free. Based on the wording, it’s not evident that they know what they are talking about. Miami skaters should go to the meeting on Tuesday, July 22nd at 6pm in the Miami Beach Botanical Garden “Butterfly Room” on 2000 Convention Center drive. Flyer after the jump. – Thanks to Seth Levy for the tip.

Here’s a few belated pics of the opening of the new skatepark in San Francisco taken by Hidehiko Fujiwara.

More bits from Team Pain. The pool/bowl above is the first part finished of larger project (40,000 sf) in Colorado Springs. Draw your own conclusions about their skate terrain preferences. Also, getting back to the Florida skatepark that could not be named, drumroll please….. Lawnwood Skatepark is the final completed name of the ST Lucie County Skatepark built in Fort Pierce, Florida. And in an unsual move for that state, it’s FREE, just as ALL PUBLIC SKATEPARKS SHOULD BE.