Just one moment in oceans of time: a small bit of aluminum wrangling with an edge of concrete. Vague memories slowly coming back into focus. Four small urethane cylinders are spinning high in mid-air—the pilot now descending back into a perfectly troweled concrete dish. Curved surfaces everywhere. The clicking of tiles and coping blocks. Far away echoes bounce off expansive walls. Wide, griptaped decks leaning; trucks flexing, turning at speed in aggressive arcs. Endless lines. The actual riding of skateboards...
1979: Cherry Hill and Apple were breakthrough skateparks that pointed toward a possible future that would never happen: vast, enclosed concrete utopias with perfect surfaces in the form of giant pools, halfpipes, banked bowls with trannies and flat walls. Inside the warehouse, weather would not play a role. Year-round skating would cultivate never-ending crops of kids purchasing skate time and equipment...
The timing of the building of these huge structures could not have been worse. Unfortunately, Apple opened in late 1979, just when the second skateboarding craze—which took off around 1976 and peaked in 1978— was heading for a quick nosedive. By the spring of 1981, things were looking fairly grim in the deep underground hiding place that skateboarding now called home. Dwindling amounts of dedicated skateboarders making their way through Apple's doors with bucks in hand forced the owner to close it down in May. Bulldozers filled the park in and sealed it over with a nice, flat concrete floor for a new and more reliable tenant: UPS. Now all that's left are a few photos and fewer faint memories.
Apple Skatepark was one of the top 10 best vert pool-based skateparks ever made. Everything in it was super smooth. The general consensus is that places like Cherry Hill, Winchester (keyhole), Marina, Whittier Skate City and maybe Lakewood (clamshell) were the only skateparks that were better or equal. Apple was built by Duane Bigelow and Wally Hollyday, who just the year before had completed Cherry Hill, which is widely regarded as the best skatepark ever. After building these two parks and several others, Duane and Wally went on to become legends in the field.
Apple featured three pools, all with tile and coping: a left-hand kidney pool (12 feet deep with canyon in the shallow end), an egg pool (12 feet deep with straight sides, flat bottom and a canyon in the shallow end), a baby keyhole (seven feet deep), a perfect halfpipe with two-thirds pipe extensions and a bowled end, an awesome banked L-bowl, several little bowls and a freestyle area(!). This well-rounded park offered something for each level of skating ability.
A few pros visited Apple in the brief 21 months it was open—most notably Duane Peters, Steve Olson, Steve Caballero, Mike McGill, David Andrecht, Brad Bowman, The Varibots, Mike Folmer and not many others. There was never a pro contest, as the park wasn't open long enough. If you blinked a few times, you could've easily missed out on Apple. It must have been the shortest-lived skatepark ever. It wasn't photographed very much, so if you have any snaps, please step forward now. It's a minor miracle I've managed to gather together the shots there are on this site. I hope it all brings back some fond memories and inspires something better for the future.
If you have anything Apple-related, even just a memory, please email it to me.
Or snail mail it to: Garry Davis PO Box 581, Lake Forest, CA 92609