Terrain and Technology
Words by Mukari Wall
Skateboarder Magazine: Volume 2 Number 2 - Fall 1975
Early skate technology was about speed
As a young child, computer classes, social media, and television seemed designed to prepare kids like me for the adult world. The skateboard did the opposite. With a piece of wood, metal trucks, and wheels, I could truly encounter my city.
I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, when I was 2 years old. While I was overwhelmed by the endless concrete and cars, I took notice of all the young skaters testing their skills in the streets. The energy was so intense that even as a toddler, I could identify what seemed to be a culture and movement, and I knew I wanted to be part of it.
This was Dogtown, the birthplace of skateboarding, and I had landed in the middle of a radical movement known as street skating. The suburban vertical skating of the 1980's was moving into the city and being transformed by the stairs, rails, ledges, and gaps of urban Los Angeles.
The first thing I ever asked for on my birthday was a skateboard. The first board I got was from Toys-R-Us. It was all plastic because I was a toddler and my parents thought I wanted a toy to play with. I did not want a toy, but something fit for flip tricks and grinds.
The next board I got was an old-school, surf-shaped board with plastic trucks. I pulled the trucks off and told them the board was broken.
Eventually I got a real board, with a symmetrical nose and tail, and I began to practice turns in my driveway. I was 7 years old, and for a couple of years that driveway seemed like the whole world. In time, I met other local skateboarders who had a different relationship with the neighborhood.
They did not look like California surfers. They spoke a mix of Spanish and English and wore white t-shirts and gold chains. They were not confined to the driveway like me, but were allowed to roam around wherever they wanted because it was their neighborhood. They convinced me to leave the driveway and ollie off the curb in front of my house. This was the first trick I ever learned.
As skaters have learned from each other and their terrain, the “ollie” has evolved and become increasingly complex
Amidst community and friends, I pushed past the boundaries of my driveway and my physical ability. That pattern would define skateboarding throughout my life: Every new trick expanded my sense of what the city, and my body, could do.
After skating the curb, I got my first piece of skate advice: “You need Grind King trucks and Powell boards. Those are the best.”
Street skate technology helped skaters adapt to their environments
Street skating was shaped by its environment. Our neighborhood’s ledges, curbs, and small stair sets produced a style that valued precision, technicality, and freshness. In the 90s, freshness meant Hip Hop.
Skaters like Kareem Campbell became the new heroes of street skating, both in ability and cultural aesthetic. Every city had its hubs: Los Angeles’ Wilshire District, New York’s Brooklyn Banks, San Francisco’s EMB Plaza, and Philadelphia’s Love Park, all of which had their own local legends who rose to global prominence.
Kareem Campbell embodied freshness in 90's Los Angeles
Hip Hop defined the look and sound of 90's street skating. Baggy jeans, basketball shoes, baseball hats. Hip Hop music was the universal sound, and graffiti became the visual aesthetic for t-shirt and board graphics.
Despite Hip Hop and skateboarding sampling from and remixing the past, there was a suspicion of nostalgia. The 1980's ramp rocker was deemed uncool and out of touch.
Even as a child, I knew I could not be a real skateboarder with an old-fashioned board. I did everything in my power to stay up to date with the most state-of-the-art equipment, which at the time was harder to find because skateboarding was still underground.
Today, 1990's skateboarding is hailed as the golden age of skateboarding, but at the time the old guard skate industry deemed it the dark ages. Skateparks had closed down, vertical ramp pros were long retired, and a new, seemingly irreverent generation of skaters was taking over.
The industry’s relationship with nostalgia has shifted. Even shoe skates, once left behind, are finding their way back into the spotlight.
For the past 20 years, the skate industry has celebrated its pre-street past through re-releases of classic board and wheel shapes for younger generations to appreciate. The X Games brought back the phenomenon of ramps and vertical skating through Tony Hawk and his successful video game franchise. Suburban skateboarders returned to the centerfold as handrail skating became the next frontier. Handrail skating was the return of the rockstar, complete with tighter jeans and bigger boards.
This shift was especially noticeable in Southern California. The desert, San Diego, and Orange County changed the landscape with large empty schoolyards complete with daunting handrails like the 20 stair set at El Toro High School. Volcom Skatepark and many other elite training facilities in suburban Southern California emerged in response to the X Games movement.
Tony Hawk: Big Brother Magazine, Issue 25.
In Los Angeles, we struggled to keep up with the new standard of skateboarding as the culture shifted back toward high-flying, suburban, daredevil rock-and-roll roots. We watched people like Bryan Herman from Victorville and Leo Romero from Fontana make their mark by coming into Los Angeles and conquering massive stair sets like the Wilshire 15 as if they were nothing.
In recent years, skateboarding has built a different relationship with nostalgia that threatens to pave over everything it once was. The urban guerrilla who adapts to any environment seems to be disappearing as more training facilities and skateparks are designed to prepare young skaters to go bigger and become Olympic-ready.
Bryan Herman, one of the first handrail skaters that came up from the new generation.
Skateboarding evolved through adaptation. Every city, neighborhood, curb, stair set, and empty lot produced its own style and way of moving through the world. But as skateboarding becomes increasingly standardized and optimized, something is being lost. Regional styles flatten as skaters around the country learn on the same obstacles and absorb the same aesthetics through social media and brand partnerships.
Skateboarding’s creativity emerged from chaos, urban decay, and limited resources. Unlike technologies designed to prepare us for the world as it already existed, the skateboard taught us to experiment with it. What began for me as turns in a driveway became a different way of seeing the city itself: not as something fixed and controlled, but as a landscape full of possibility.
Tony Alva rides a concrete bank common to schoolyards—proof that skaters see possibility in places most people overlook.
Mukari is an artist, skateboarder, archivist and stylist based out of West Los Angeles. Within each of these worlds it has been a life-long process of research and contextualizing unique, but pivotal parts of Los Angeles culture.
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