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.

One of the highlights of my trip was getting to skate with House of Neil again. The two of us started Skate and Annoy together, and it was his idea actually. We have a long history together. He had a surprise for me, and when I arrived he presented me with the skateboard he said I was riding the first time he met me.

I got back from vacation and found a free monthly neighborhood paper sitting in the pile of neglected mail. The cover story of the Sentinel is Skateboarders Without Borders. It’s about local D.I.Y. project that is not so much of a secret, but still, the article pretty much gives the exact location and shows a landmark photo that all but draws a map for you. On top of that, the author interviewed the current land owners. I heard there was a “bust” of sorts during construction but that there were no real consequences. If they weren’t already numbered, my guess is this spot is about to become extinct. I hope the guy in the interview used a fake name.

Lulu.com is an on-demand publisher. They will print copies of your book when someone wants to buy one. Kind of like a vanity press although no one has to pay unless they actually want the book. The Hopeless Old Men On Skateboards collections and Hugo and that Dumb Skateboard are available through Lulu and here’s another example. Otter Learns to Skateboard by Rhett Saugier is available as a soft-cover book for purchase or a free download. Although there are some good things about it, editing and art direction would have helped. Which illustrates how easy it is to get a book printed, even if you lack professional know-how.

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?

Our research department looked into the similarity between the skater sculpture in Naperville , Illinois and the one in Milton Freewater, Oregon. We found a few additional examples, but no catalog yet. Apparently sculptors are also over the handplant.

L to R: Bronze Boy on a Skateboard by the people who brought you the Bronze Girl on a Skateboard previously mentioned on SnA,
Ollie the laurels,
Naperville, Illinois example,
Skater Boi in Albuquerque, NM,
Czech triumphal skateboarder,
The Milton-Freewater skater.

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.

Welcome On Board is for skateboarders, not BMX, not graffiti.

Public Sculpture by Guillaume Ségur who describes the project:

When I consider skateboarding in terms of the production of forms or spaces, it is the Möbius strip that comes to mind. Looping, twisting, inversion and continuous motion are all figures performed by the skater in the space surrounding him. The form is also of particular interest because it has often been utilised in public sculpture projects. It is one of the stereotypes of 1970s public sculpture. In this particular context, the work acts as a pattern, code, a recognisable symbol.

Q spotted this and Dave Tobin told me about it. It was a newspaper insert advertising Qwest high speed internet.

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.