D.I.Y. Skateboarding
On arrival I don’t think anyone really knew what we were getting ourselves into for the following week back in early June in Hannover, Germany. The basic concept was that the 2er [tsvi-er] crew had the idea to invite D.I.Y skate crews from all corners of Europe to come to their spot and each team would be given three days to build something.
When we first entered the room, it was a full junkyard. But now, it is really a BEAUTY. Smooth to skate, a good couch, even a decent sound system. Over a year, we were working in small steps until we completed our indoor pool. We learned with every step new ways of building, so you’ll feel it in every corner, which are all different to skate, due to the learning process.
Here is the history of a little 500 square meter skate park that we built last autumn in Girona, Spain out of mostly recycled materials.
This all began for me at the luxurious point at which £20,000 of funding had already been secured by a local skatepark development worker, however it became clear that the funders didn’t actually want to part with the money for various reasons and seemed pretty negative when they realised I had half a clue as to how to pull this off!
PARISITE DIY is the skate park of New Orleans. It is located on and
named after Paris Avenue. Formed in 2012 after the demolition of, “The
Peach Orchard.”
“What can one say about my best friend? He eats sleeps and breathes skateboarding. If he couldn’t be enveloped in skateboarding, I truly believe he would dry up and turn to dust. His entire life has been dedicated to progression through ideas and fruition. It all started with exploring on his bike with a milk crate and to this day, he is still constructing skate obstacles and teaching people how to take their skateboarding destiny into their own hands through doing it themselves…” – Kim Cook
I did four days of crete with Flyramp. Super hot and humid down there and the mud went off super fast… We were on this island, so neat! Ilhabela now has a great Pista de Skate! The hip air is Ulysses Pinna, he’s stoked, lives two blocks from the park, brought us sodies and helped clean up and first sesh ripper. BBQs and waterfall picinas… Everyone there was so happy! Theres’ a photo of the crete haulers too. Passion Fruit trowel, aka Maracuja blade. GSRF (General Sherman’s Radius Floats) packing up for the states… Sick harbor and sunrays beamin… Ilhabela 2012.” – Soup
Never ending beer discussions had to stop. Every one of us wanted to build something and it was time to get radical. One day around 2 o´clock in the morning we were enlightened! We found the message carved in our table at the bar. We finished a few more beers (and a few shots), got the whole crew together and started to search for the spot.
On the 27th of October, 2012, the National Wallie Cup took place in Montréal. Originally invented by Pontus Alv, owner of Polar Skateboards in Sweden, Yan Tremblay the head behind Projet45 and as of recently, owner of YTdistribution, threw the same contest this year in Montréal, before hurricanes or earthquakes come to destroy our lovely Canada.
1st Floor is the biggest concrete indoor DIY spot in Poland and probably in whole Europe (*see editors note at bottom). It is located in Lublin, a city in the eastern part of Poland. The history of 1st Floor started in the autumn of 2010, when local skaters cleaned up part of an abandoned building, in order to have a place to skate in the winter time. Jacek Harasimiuk, a local skater, put a bunch of photos from that day on his blog.