Glenn's Old Time Skate Gallery

The release of the movie "Dog Town and Z Boys" inspired me to go through my old collection of photos from my heavy skating days of the late 70s and try to assemble something on the web. This is the beginning of a work in progress so stay tuned for (hopefully) more.

I started skateboarding regularly in Junior High School (around 1974). The local ice arena in Allen Park had some nice cement embankements out back that made perfect skating terrain and we spent just about every day there during our summers. In high school, several of us joined the "Systems" Skateboard Team which was sponsored by Schuman's Schwinn Cyclery in Dearborn, Michigan. Right about that same time (a little before that actually), some parks started to pop up in Michigan. In the greater Detroit area, I remember four of them.

• Redford Skateboard Park - located in Redford, Michigan. This place was pretty much a disaster from day one. The terrain had to have been designed by someone who had never been on a board. They charged by the hour and at the end of each hour, they'd clear everybody off and charge for the next hour to let you back in. I still remember the woman's voice over the PA shouting "your hour is over, would you please clear the track". Thankfully, this place was put out of it's misery and closed.
  
  
• Skateboard City - located in Warren, Michigan. This was the first good park. They lacked good vertical terrain but the place was loaded with some really nice bowls and a couple of excellent snake runs. After a couple of seasons, some rising competition out of the east forced revision. I don't remember if ownership changed or not but the name of the park was changed from Skateboard City to Skateboard USA and they added two pools. Both pools were very deep and pretty difficult to ride (not for the faint of heart) but the real experts seemed to like the challenge. Many a good contest was held here and during one summer's contest, the park was visited by some of the big guns from the west like Tony Alva, Fred Blood, and Steve Olson.
  
  
• Odyssey - located in Livonia, Michigan. Odyssey was the first indoor park in southeast Michigan. It was basically a store space in a strip mall that was gutted and outfitted with a snack bar and a handful of fiberglass ramps. Some of the ramps were pretty much a joke but they had two great half pipes. One was only about three feet high and the other was more like twelve feet high. These were also the first half pipes I ever rode in that had a flat area in between the two sides which made for much better pumping and height. This place was good because we could ride there year round, rain or shine. We had a blast here.
  
  
• Endless Summer - located in Roseville, Michigan. For us, this place was always the best park in Michigan. It was the first park that had a pool. The pool was pretty nasty though with a transition that would loft you right into space if you weren't careful. They did have some other great terrain though. They had a huge freestyle area that was a blast to surf through, a small peanut bowl that was fun, and an excellent long half pipe. After a season or two, Endless Summer added a second pool. It was a big kidney pool and turned out to be the best pool southeast Michigan had seen. It had a beautiful smooth surface and huge transitions. It turned out to be pretty easy to work the new pool from side to side and we had a blast there.
  
  

Endless Summer was where we did most of our skating. By the time we were making weekly trips out there (about 30 minutes one way), our team had disbanded but several of us still skated together. Matt MacDonald, Tom Demerly, Larry Cepuran, Bob Reedy, Joe Barak, John Thiry, and myself all crammed into Larry's tiny car and headed out there almost every weekend. John usually kept his skating to a minimum and, instead, took a lot of photos. His skate photos are, even today, about the best skate photos I've seen out of southeast Michigan.

Shown below is a sampling of what I could find. Most of the photos I have were taken at Endless Summer. This park had it's share of locals who were much better than we were and ended up being the subjects of many of John's photos. I'm going to try and locate a bunch more. Hopefully from some other parks also.

Click any of the thumbnails below to see the larger version. The first eleven photos were taken by John Thiry in the 1979-1982 time frame. Some photos after that were donated by Gary Coghlin who was also a southeast Michigan skater back then and found this gallery on the web.