In Northeast Ohio, rollerbladers show off their best tricks on a steep handrail to become ‘King of Cleveland.’ At a Columbus skate park, a group of unicyclists speeds down a ramp. Tucked away in the Appalachian hills, skateboarders flock to a graffiti-covered skatepark of world renown.
Author Mandy Shunnarah of Columbus wheels us to these spots in their new book “Midwest Shreds”, which argues the region shapes skate culture as much or more than the West Coast. Some Midwestern states rank the highest for skateparks per capita, including in Ohio where there's a skate park for every 95,000 people.
Shunnarah took a tour of so-called flyover states' popular skate parks and documented the Midwestern skaters who conquered them. They sat down with the Ohio Newsroom to talk about what they found.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
On the Midwest’s role in shaping skate culture
“Rollerblades were invented in Minnesota by an ice hockey player who wanted to practice off skates in the warmer seasons. There's a family-owned… roller skate manufacturer that has been in business for nearly 80 years, the Chicago Roller Skate Company, [that dissolved in the 1990s] which manufactured all these early roller skates. And we still use a lot of their patents and designs today.
The Midwest was building skates. And if it hadn't been for all that manufacturing and innovation and invention of these things – like polyurethane wheels, for example, that were later used by skateboarders in California to affix to planks of wood that became what we now know is skateboards – today, none of that on the West Coast would have existed without the Midwest.
You don't have to go across the country to find a good skate park. We have hundreds, so many skate parks here that are fantastic to shred.”
On Southeast Ohio’s world renowned anarchist skate park
“Skatopia is in Rutland, Ohio, which is rural Appalachian Ohio in the southeast part of the state. And it was started by, now retired former pro skateboarder Brewce Martin. And he always, before Skatopia, rented property, and the landlords didn't like when he would build these massive ramps and throw these wild parties.
And so he decided to build his personal Skatopia. And it is such an extreme skate park, there's really nothing else like it, probably in the country… It became such a legend among the pros that if you played the Tony Hawk pro skateboarder video games as a kid, it's one of the sites in the game.
It's entirely volunteer built, and so the skaters make it what they want it to be. They're not appealing to the local government and working with professional skate park architects to say, ‘Oh, we want a flow ball or we want a 12-stair.’ They're just doing it themselves.”
On how skating builds community
“I have found, just me personally, that skaters as a whole tend to be the kindest and most supportive people… You want this community of other kind of alternative outsiders, for lack of a better term, who get it, who understand what might seem crazy or even absurd to a non-skating person, who might look at you and think, ‘Why would you throw yourself off of a ramp with wheels attached to your feet?’
There's just nothing that compares to that euphoria of feeling like you conquered physics, like you defied gravity. It takes a special kind of person to understand that and not want to tell you to think of all the bones you could break. We've thought about that, and we choose to do it anyway. So I think that's really why the community is so tight knit, because we just understand each other in a way that the average person just doesn't.”
On their favorite Ohio skate spot
“I have a soft spot for Skate Naked, which is [Columbus’] only indoor skate park, because that's where I first learned. I just fell in love with the place. It's gritty. It's gross. You leave with a thick coat of black grime under your nails. It is, to me, the epitome of Midwestern DIY, gritty ethos. And it just goes to show that as a people and as a culture, if Midwesterners want something, they'll make it happen. And it may look scrappy, but it will get the job done every time.”
