This is am image of a SpohnCrete precast waterfall from a Flickr post. It addresses one of the concerns found in the “cons” section of prefab concrete from companies such as Spohn Ranch, who have actually sent me a bunch of imagery and correspondence as a rebuttal to previous criticisms that I need to get to formatting. This is not an endorsement, rather a presentation of information to do with as you please. You can read what they have to say on the waterfall and other features on Flickr.

Going off right now right here You’ll have to register but it doesn’t take long. I couldn’t get the low bandwidth version to go but the bigger one worked. Thanks to Troy Sliter for the heads up.

Gee, I hope they get it finished in time. Continuing yesterday’s aerial photo obsession, here’s a shot of tomorrow’s Oregon Trifecta stop, the Tigard skatepark, under construction as seen by Google Maps. When this was taken, Gabriel Park was just a dot on the horizon. The satellite flybys must be scheduled more frequently over big cities, because Lincoln City is still at phase one.

After spending most of the session at Northbrook, Neil asked if I wanted to check out Chicagoland’s oldest concrete skatepark located near by in Deerfield, Illinois. He said it was janky, but they used to call it home before Northbrook existed. I’ve never been one to pass up some jank and/or history for a quick photo or two.

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 and scooter hybrids outnumbered the skaters. A couple carloads of kids show up and I thought the session might get started. Then I realize nobody has skateboards. The lurkers are cruising circles on longboards in the parking lot. The parking lot is about a mile from a street that isn’t just a connector for other parking lots, sitting way in back of an athletic field complex. The suburbs suck. I start trying to transfer from one quarterpipe to another with ends touching, tilted in a 45 degree angle. I fail miserably because I can’t backside ollie without some sort of hip. Some kid named Joel notices my repeated failures and shows me up by hitting multiple frontside ollies. I take his picture. You read about it. A booming and wealthy suburb named Naperville can’t build a decent skatepark for the kids.

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!