Back in March 2009 I was In Portland, Oregon and skated Burnside one morning before flying home to St. Louis, Missouri…. On the way home I couldn’t stop thinking about how we must have a bridge somewhere in St. Louis where we can build a Burnside style park. I got home and the next day my roommate told me to go to this bridge on Kingshighway Blvd. where some teenagers had been building skate obstacles….
I think of Love and Dedication in several areas of life and I can surely identify these two feelings whenever I see them. This struck me again recently when I saw a raw space, dirty, wet and ugly, turn into an awesome indoor skateable area made with that Love and Dedication I mentioned earlier.
I guess most skaters’ dream is to settle down at some point in their lives on a property with a little bowl in the backyard, or at least some kind of private shredable terrain such as an indoor miniramp.
After the demise of the Bronson Ditch project, Clayton Graul was already on the hunt for a new location. Having participated with USP at Bronson, I was also on the hunt for a new location for them. My hunt didn’t take me deeper into the woods or another ditch off the beaten path. I was led right to my local prefab skatepark.
A great adventure that started with nothing. Everybody paid for concretes bags themselves, and we build it as it comes!
No plans, no rules, just Rock’n’Roll and fun.
My son Thomas called me at home and told me there was a spot that he thought we could build on. It turns out it’s this neighbor kid Lucas’s house. I really didn’t like this kid much. It seemed to me that they were always fighting, but I rode my bike down there anyway to see what was up. It turns out it was a piece of property that his Grandpa gave him.
A few years before we found the place where we built todays little skatehall paradise including germany’s first indoor concrete bowl and a big wooden street / flow section, we had a much smaller skatehall, just a few hundred meters from our current place.
We were cleaning up the mess of the Malinas Machinas on monday and the brewer (Frans van Craenenbroeck) comes to me and he says: ‘I bought a café with a hangar in the back. Can you come check it out and see if it’s possible to built a skatepark in there?’…
Getting old sucks. One has to get a “job”, “be responsible”, hang overs get worse, healing after slams take longer and other lame “adult” like things. What doesn’t suck about getting old: Friendships grow stronger, one can start drinking any time of the day…
The people from Vigo, Galicia searched for a place to skate indoors for more than a year.
Nestled in the Griffith Park area (Hollywood Hills), where hiking trails welcome hundreds of people a day, Bronson Canyon ditch has been the destination for any skater who visits southern California and more specifically, Hollywood. But like the Hollywood movies that have emerged over the years, someone decided to do something new and exciting with a location that has been untouched for decades. Clayton Graul and his crew have recently taken the DIY approach to Bronson Ditch and have added some creativity to its legendary status.
Confusion Magazine – Issue #8 – out now! Features with Frank Shaw, Sox, Lovenskate in Basque, DIY skate spots including Bluestone (Australia), Port Land (Switzerland), PFK (Japan), a music feature with Mike Neider from Bl’ast, an artist feature with Zombie Stu, a scene report on Cadiz, Spain, Hot shit, product reviews, zine reviews, video reviews, a Ramp Jam in Belgium and so much more.