In her early days, while leading the way for women in street skating in the late 1990's and early 2000's, Elissa Steamer was a local at The Ashtray, and nearby Oceanview High School. It's not in this clip, but there are a couple of shots from Oceanview, which is a block away.
First, a little skate history. There's no consensus on who invented the first skateboard, one prominent theory says it was a bored surfer in San Diego in about 1958. A 2 X 6, and some roller skate wheels, and he could go "sidewalk surfing" when the waves were flat. The "Devil's Toy" was born. The start of skateboarding was probably something like that. The first big wave of skate popularity was in 1965-1966, and skateboarding looked like this. The quick fad of corporate interest faded, and skateboarding went underground.
In the early 1970's, skating moved to downhill speed runs, wheelies, slaloms, and carving banks, led by guys like Bruce Logan, among many others. That led to the second big wave of popularity, around 1975-1980. Again, skateboarding became a fad to large toy companies, a way to make a quick buck for a couple of years. I was one of those 70's kids who started skating during that fad, in the tiny town of Willard, Ohio, in 1976, in my case.
But out in Southern California, where the sport was centered, a group called the Z-Boys, the Zephyr Surf Shop skate team out of Venice Beach, along with Duante Peters and a few others down in Orange County, discovered empty swimming pools were a great place to skate. This led to the first wave of skateboard parks in the late 1970's, and a new aspect of skating, vertical walled pools, concrete waves that never moved, that could be "surfed" on skateboards, like Tony here in Marina Del Rey in 1978. Suddenly skateparks became a viable business in Southern California, and select places across the United States, and a few foreign countries. The boom surged for a while, but then began to fade in the early 1980's. One by one, the skateparks of the second wave of skateboarding closed down.
By the mid-1980's, only two were left in Southern California, Pipeline Skatepark in Upland, and Del Mar Skate Ranch in Del Mar (north of San Diego). In addition to skateparks pushing the evolution of skateboard vert riding, BMX bike riders in the mid-1970's realized skateparks were fun on bikes, as well. Bob Haro is credited with inventing BMX freestyle, about 1977, and by 1985, Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, and a few others, took BMX vert riding to a new level in the skateparks.
Vert skating and bike riding both moved largely to halfpipes for contests and demos, because it's really hard to take a concrete skatepark on the road to do demos. First Del Mar closed, and then in late 1988, Pipeline Skatepark, the last California Skatepark closed, and a few months later, in 1989, was eaten by the excavator.
During that same period, in the third wave of skateboarding, in the late 1980's, Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guererro, and Natas Kaupas took skateboarding back to the streets in a new way, taking Rodney Mullen's flat ground ollie, kickflip, and other freestyle tricks, to new terrain. Street skating began growing as vert skating faded. Pool skating and BMX went underground, and was banished in California to empty backyard pools and the Nude Bowl, way out in the desert.
As luck would have it, I was working at Unreel Productions, the video company for Vision Skateboards, one of the "Big 5" skateboard companies of the late 1980's. A handful of then Old School skaters there had a plan. They wanted public skateparks to become a thing. the time had come for free, open all the time, public skateparks. They tried to talk the city of Costa Mesa, where Vision was located, into building one. But Costa Mesa, like all cities, was worried about liability. They didn't want to get sued for millions of dollars, because some skater fell and broke his arm.
So before public skateparks could happen, those Old School skaters had to get a state law passed so that cities couldn't be sued for liability at skateparks. That process took several years. Then they had to talk a city into building a skatepark. then they had to talk the city into funding that skatepark, and actually get it built, and see if a public skatepark could work ( in the eyes of city leaders, we all knew it would work).
I think it was about 1993 by the time the first public skatepark in California was built. That was in Murdy Park, officially at 7000 Norma drive in Huntington Beach, near Goldenwest and Warner. Without this sketchy little park paving the way (literally), none of the other public skateparks in all of California would have happened. So if you ever make it to Huntington Beach, go to The Ashtray, snap and ollie, and say thanks. We thought it was going to get turned into a duck pond by now. It's not great, but it's cool it still exists.
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