Dreamparks of the Northwest
Keith Eric Davidson (EXPN.com) -- 10/30/2003
Halloween, 1991. Portland skateboarders Bret Taylor and Mark "Red" Scott begin construction on The Burnside Project, what is to become the most legendary renegade skatepark in the country. With no experience and using their own money and labor, the pair handcrafted a revolutionary skatepark unmatched in quality to this day.
Hidden beneath a freeway overpass, Burnside is known throughout the world as one of the gnarliest, most creative skateparks ever built. The skaters who created it had total say in its construction from the beginning until its completion somewhere around 1995. Forgoing the normal time-consuming process of city council meetings and political red tape typical of city-built parks, skaters who were fed up with having no good parks to skate joined together and created their own.
It's true that we are currently in the midst of a skatepark construction boom, but most of the free parks being built by city planners are nothing more than an excuse for the cops to kick skaters off the street. So the dudes in the Northwest figured if they want their parks done right, they had to build them themselves.
That was the motivation behind Dreamland Skateparks, Red's construction company in Portland, which today churns out hands-down the best parks in the world. He refined the crude construction techniques used to build Burnside and developed techniques specific to skatepark construction. One of his innovations is a hand-built trowel which creates perfectly smooth transitions. Rail by rail, bowl by bowl, he honed the park-building process.
The do-it-yourself aesthetic was also the motivation for Mark Hubbard—a critical member of the crew that built Burnside—to start his Seattle-based company, Grindline Skateparks. The end result: skateparks designed, developed and built entirely by skateboarders.
The parks these two companies create are, without question, the best skateparks in the world, and it's no surprise a majority of them are located in their native Northwest region. But the companies don't limit themselves to Oregon and Washington. Dreamland and Grindline build parks all over the world. Dreamland even built a private bowl in the Montana backyard of Jeff Ament, the bass player for Pearl Jam.
Anyone who has seen these guys skate understands why the parks they build are unmatched. They are some of the gnarliest skaters around. When they build a park, they make it big and challenging, something that won't become boring and outdated within a couple of years. They know once the concrete dries, it's there for good.
Their parks are trademarked with PNW-gnar like massive pipes emptying into huge pool coping-crowned pools, over-vert bowled-out cradles, rotating pillars, endless miles of concrete coping, hips galore, spines and perfect mini-pools. If you can dream it, these guys have already built it. And when they finish, they skate 'em like no one else.
Movies
Northwest (2003) - We are so lucky to live in the Pacific Northwest. Oregon skaters were always looking south to where the skateparks and the skate media were. We never really had skateparks here, City Skates, was there anything else? Tri-Cities skatepark and Olympia in Washington but it never really happened here. During the dark years (also known as the Dork years when dork skating opened up creativity but killed vert skating) a few hardcores kept it going with backyard ramps and eventually, Burnside. Nichols/Charnoski - the makers of Fruit of the Vine document the Burnside/Dreamland/Grindline crew and what it's like to be a hardcore skater in the Pacific Northwest. This takes the story up to Aumsville - incredible skating. If you’ve ever skated Burnside you know that it’s hard to figure out the lines. There is amazing footage of Burnside skating in here - stuff you would never even think of doing.
Books
Burnside skatepark: Built by skaters for skaters, this swooping concrete park beneath Portland's Burnside Bridge lures boarders from around the globe. Firmly entrenched in skateboarding lore for ignoring tiny details like, oh, getting city approval before building, the park has become a catalyst for renegade park builders everywhere.
Filmmakers Coan Nichols and Rick Charnoski would certainly be considered friends of the renegade skateboarder subculture, and they first collaborated on 1999's Fruit of the Vine, a grainy, manic Super 8 documentary on the backyard pool skating underground. With their latest project, the subject is still skateboarding, but their focus is on skateparks of the Northwest (hence the title), and more importantly the people who build them.
Nichols and Charnoski allow the skatepark builders, a crazy bunch of die-hard skaters with colorful names like Q, the Ox, the Greek, and Munk, to offer bits of their skate-centric world outlook as we see them traversing the Northwest installing their custom-made masses of wildly curving concrete like modern-day Johnny Appleseeds. We learn indirectly that a lot of them started cobbling together early public skateparks in Oregon in 1990, and in Northwest we see them, now 12 years later, still assembling even more diabolically twisted creations that are seemingly designed to heighten the speed and thrill of daredevil skating.
But at its center, Northwest is all about the mystical vibe of skateboarding, and really not much else, unfortunately. We never get more than a cursory glance into the individual skaters, and even when they are identified by name they still remain largely anonymous throughout. One shouldn't go into this documentary expecting a deep, well-heeled history of skating and skateparks, because underneath it all, Northwest is all about the pure rough-and-tumble thrill of the skateboard lifestyle, and not a timeline. The moments of simple narrative give way to Nichols and Charnoski's endless (well, 46-minute, anyway) and sometimes surreal shots of skateboarders riding all manner of curved concrete walls, and the frenetic skill of the riders is captured with a kind of raw and very real glee, made even more edgy thanks to the Super 8 format.
While there maybe isn't a lot to necessarily learn in Northwest, the visual chops of the filmmakers is a sold compliment to the subject, and their use of a diverse set of local music on the soundtrack (from punk to folk to ethnic) adds to the gravity-defying actions of the participants. A film like this is more a series of visuals than it is an historical compendium, and I suppose if you sit down to watch a skateboard documentary then you should expect to see skateboarding. And lots of it.
About me: The genesis of Dreamland Skateparks is Portland's world-famous Burnside Skatepark.
Burnside's rise from junkie lair to its current glory was due to ten years of sweat, toil, and piecemeal ingenuity by local diehards whom (Mark) Scott led to expand upon Bret Taylor's original impetus.
Entirely unsubsidized, they laid down concrete and tested it as they went along until they achieved the desired result. It is a grass roots reclamation project that so positively changed the surrounding neighborhood that the city bestowed on (Mark Scott) and the rest a citation for civic improvement...
...Burnside is an awe-inspiring pilgrimage site because the right fanatics built it for all the right reasons -
Portland is home to Burnside. For all you pussies that have been to Portland but never skated Burnside, I got no love for you. The rest of you know what Im talking about. The way I see it, you dont go to Portland without skating Burnside at least once. Burnside is pretty much in its own class. We were talking about all the best skateparks Burnside can't even be put in the same group. Burnside's not a skatepark, Burnside's Burnside.
The land right next to the skatepark has recently been sited for development and will be seeing multiple office towers next door within a year's time. After sitting down with the developer and architect of the new development, Burnside Skatepark Inc. secured lighting and additional land to expand the skatepark. Partners in Burnside Skatepark, Inc., Mark "Red" Scott, Chuck Willis and Sage Bolyard, have said that all additional work to the skatepark will be done. Basically, Dreamland Skateparks will be doing the work, but Burnside is still footing the bill. This way we are still in total control over the park and it's design. The more money we can get from donations and a raffle, the more elaborate we can make the skatepark addition. Please let me know by e-mail, burnsideskatepark@hotmail.com, if this is something you would be interested in helping us out with. That's it, go skate. Chuck Willis - Burnside Skatepark, Inc.
Designed, built in 1990, and maintained today by individual members of the Dreamland team, it remains one of the skateboarding world's most revered, challenging, and highly respected locations. Burnside is featured internationally in the skateboarding media on an near-monthly basis, its landscape is featured in the best-selling Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game, and is a must-skate location for professionals everywhere. Tony Hawk himself considers it among his five favorite skateparks (USA Today, May 5, 2003).
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