It was some garbage ramp in a clearing in a wooded, undeveloped lot. The first ramp I ever skated was horrible. This isn’t actually one of the shit ramps that I skated, but it may as well be. Every suburban skater with an indulgent or unconcerned parent built a ramp at some point. The key was that there were a lot of them. Some of them lasted years, some only lasted months. What we had was a loose, shifting network of ramps. If there wasn’t one down the street you built one somewhere. You went to the one down the street instead. No one traveled very far to skate a tiny mini ramp. In rural areas a vert ramp could be a destination, people would drive distances to skate it. You needed space not available in the cities to build these ramps but you also needed a certain amount of population density. I imagine this was true for much of the suburbs across the nation at this time. There were many more ramps scattered throughout the small section of Baltimore County of which we were aware. Through him, I gradually met the rest of the Cockeysville skaters, specifically Young and a second Jeff, Jeff R.ĭuring those four years, both Jeffs had backyard mini ramps. He was in my homeroom and I recognized him from Lutherville. I met the first of them, Marc, my very first day at high school. Most of them would slowly quit during that first year as well but those that didn’t became the core of my skate crew and some of my closest friends. Unlike my middle school, many of the Cockeysville kids still skated. The second served the next neighborhood to the north, Cockeysville. Two middle schools primarily fed into my high school.

Jeff B was a year ahead of me, so I was, for all intents and purposes, the only incoming freshman from my middle school who still skated. Brian, like most of the other boys, had lost interest and stopped. Of Team PEB, Eddie still skated but went off to a different school. The skateboarding craze of the mid ’80s was over by the time I entered high school. As suburban kids, we too skated a lot of street. It seems fitting that since we happened to come up during this transitional phase, we primarily chose to skate something that was in itself in between. By 1993, they had become the familiar popsicle shape, almost indistinguishable from today’s modern boards. The boards changed to match this emerging style of skating, acquiring bigger, steeper noses, slowly shrinking and losing their shapes. Across the country, city kids flocked to urban plazas, such as Love Park or Embarcadero for example, and these hot spots would soon launch the new technical style of street skating that took over in the mid ‘90s. By the following year, street skating had begun to take prominence and the ‘80s vert pros were starting to look like relics from an earlier era. The release of The Search for Animal Chin in 1987 marks the apex of vert’s popularity. My high school years, 1988-1992, perfectly coincided with what was a major transition period in skateboarding. The few backyard vert ramps still around were primarily skated by an older crowd. In the late ’80s vert went out of fashion among the kids. If you are interested, that scene is nicely documented over at House of Steam. When I started high school in 1988, the vert ramp scene that had flourished up and down the east coast was on its way out. If we had a scene that was specifically ours, it was backyard mini ramps. Backyard Mini Ramps Patrick Eisenhauer Posted on December 6, 2014

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