It's All in the Swoop

By Richard Lacayo

If Salvador Dali had fashioned the moon, its surface might look something like the skate park in Sayreville, N.J. Undulating concrete bowls flow toward one another like bumping wombs. Ribboning "snake runs" slither around steel-pipe rails and abrupt concrete boxes. If it all seems like a dreamscape, that's because it is. This is the kind of place that skateboarders dream about. Steve Lenardo, 32, a physical-education teacher who also co-owns the local skate shop, comes down here a lot with his board. "It keeps my blood flowing," he says. "There's always something new to try, always new lines to find."

There's a skate-park building boom going on right now, and new lines--the kind that skaters course along and the kind that designers draw--are what it's all about. "Five years ago, there were 200 skate parks," says John Bernards, executive director of the International Association of Skateboard Companies. "Today there are over 2,400, with many more under construction." During those same years, skate-park design reached a plateau of sophistication that you might not have expected from guys who wear really baggy shorts. As skaters have moved into the role of designers, establishing firms like SITE Design Group, Dreamland, Team Pain and Grindline--a grind is what you do when you skate down one of those steel-pipe handrails--the skate park has evolved into an entirely new subdepartment of landscape architecture.

What it produces are places where familiar elements of the urban landscape are digested and sent back to us as sculptural environments. Curved basins recall the empty swimming pools where so much of skateboarding was refined. Slopes hint at the concrete canal embankments where a million kids scuffed their elbows. The best parks give you the impression that layers of urban and suburban memory have been compressed into rolling seabeds. The whole place is like a collective unconscious forged in concrete. All so that some 12-year-old can use it to do a kick flip.

In the same way that skateboard style has influenced clothing and graphics, the new parks have begun to grab the attention of designers in other fields. Architect David Rockwell, designer of the Nobu restaurants in Manhattan and the set of the musical Hairspray, says skate parks, with their use of "the continuous ramp that leads you through a series of adventures," were an inspiration for a new playground he's working on. Joe Ragsdale, who teaches landscape architecture at California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo, says that every year his students come up with different ways to provide ideal flight paths for intrepid skaters. "Skate parks have come of age," he says.

Skateboarding has been around since the late 1950s, when California surfers began attaching wheels to short boards so that they could retrieve on dry land just a bit of the feeling they got from a wave. In no time it had evolved into an acrobatic art form that derived, like ballet, from the eternal human impulse to part the air with style. Skate parks, which first appeared in the 1970s, started out as places meant to draw skaters away from the respectable concrete of downtown. But those early parks tended to be melancholy stretches of concrete with a few bowls and half pipes--that's a semicircular ramp--thrown in. The merest parking lot was more fun. Over the next decade many of the parks closed, victims of underuse and high insurance costs.

For reasons that no one has ever fully explained, skateboarding made a comeback in the '90s, and with it came a return to the construction of skate parks--safer places that usually required helmets and elbow pads. Park "design" tended to be contracted out to sidewalk-concrete pourers, playground-equipment manufacturers and lowball bidders. Most had never set foot on a skateboard, much less done a 360 on one. The results were uninspiring. To an intrepid teenager, a mass-produced ramp is about as exciting as a documentary on the Federal Reserve System. Thrasher, a skating magazine, spotlights the worst parks in a feature it calls "Certified Piece of Suck."

But in those same years, a generation of skaters turned designers began to emerge. As skaters, they knew how to provide features interesting to other skaters at all levels of ability. They designed the parks and then crafted them like potters at a wheel. Tim Payne, 46, is the founder of Team Pain, based in Orlando, Fla. "Everything is placed, formed and troweled by hand," he says.

Wally Hollyday, 48, who designed the Sayreville park, helped conceive his first one in 1977, when he was an 18-year-old disillusioned by what he found when he moved to California from New Jersey. "For me, it's about getting really interesting, organic shapes that flow," he says. "Skating came out of surfing. Waves are curved and moving, and they change shape at all times. When you put up concrete, you need to put those curves and moves into it."

The essential element of most great skate parks is the bowls--rounded craters that can be as deep as 12 ft., which skaters can barrel down, building enough speed to coast along the walls and climb the rim. All bowls--round, oval and peanut-shaped--are descended from the ur-bowl of skateboarding, an empty swimming pool. But park design has moved far from the basic pool formations. "Now it's about taking those and intersecting them," says Hollyday. "I have to keep thinking of the next shape."

Like a lot of skate-park designers, Mark Hubbard, a former pro skater who is the founder of Grindline, got his start constructing swimming pools, a job that let him hang around those beautiful smooth surfaces. Now his 50-person outfit works on six parks at a time. And although Hubbard is 35, he still tries them out when they're done. "I'll skate until I can't anymore," he says. "And then I'll keep building. There are a lot of towns in America, and they could all use a skate park."

Go to time.com for a photo essay on the history and evolution of skateboarding

With reporting by Reported by Carolina A. Miranda