Here's a great shot of 1970's era skateboarding at the Huntington Beach Pier bank, some variation of a Bertleman or layback slide. The bank is long gone now, but this was a major session spot for skateboarders, and a few BMXers, in the 1970's, early 1980's, and for most of the summer of 1989. I pulled this photo from the web, skater and photographer unknown. It's the only good photo I could find of the bank.
Huntington Beach in 1987
Getting laid off, after only five months working at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', is what ultimately led me to Huntington Beach. I got the magazine job thanks to my zine, San Jose Stylin', where I wrote about the San Francisco Bay area riders for a year. My last day at Wizard Publications was December 31, 1986. I was still a roommate with Gork and Lew, who had been my co-workers. I was a really uptight dork in those days, and just wasn't the right fit for that business. I had saved up some money during my short stint at Wizard, so I paid a month's rent, and spent my days in January 1987 calling around the BMX industry, looking for another job, so I could stay in Southern California. After calling around a bit each morning, I'd go riding with Craig Grasso all day, who lived nearby. Those were some epic riding days, hitting local ramps, doing some street riding, and flatland sessions at The Spot in Redondo Beach every night. After about three weeks, I heard from Bob Morales who ran the American Freestyle Association (AFA), and he hired me to be the newsletter editor and photographer for the AFA. A couple months later, Wizard hired 17-year-old BMXer/skater kid from the East coast, a kid named Spike Jonze. He worked out much better at Wizard. He moved into my old bedroom in Gork and Lew's apartment in Hermosa Beach.
Bob Morales showed up with the AFA van one day in late January, we packed up all my junk, and headed down into Orange County, to Huntington Beach. I stayed on Bob's couch for two or three weeks, and started work at the AFA, then found a room to rent. I got settled in the new apartment, near Springdale and Warner, my new roommate was an older guy who worked at a car dealership.
I soon found my way down to the Huntington Beach Pier one weekend. There was a small group of locals, who, ironically, were mostly from other places. A tall, skinny BMX freestyler, Mike Sarrail, drove down from the San Gabriel Valley every weekend to ride. Two of the world's top freestyle skateboarders, Pierre Andre', from France, and Don Brown, from England, were down there nearly every weekend, unless there was a contest or demo somewhere else. Hans Lingren, from Sweden, and H.B. local freestyle skater, Jeremy Ramey, rounded out the main pier crew in that era.
Pierre skated for Sims, and Don for Vision, both part of the Vision Skateboards empire, in nearby Costa Mesa. I had met Don on a photo shoot for FREESTYLIN' a few months before, and I reintroduced myself, and hung out and started doing some of my flatland tricks for the crowds. I soon became a local of the Huntington Beach pier, in the spring of 1987.
The north side of the Huntington Beach Pier, the amphitheater area now, in a photo I took in 2019, shot from out on the pier. On the far right, you can see steps coming down from the pier level to the beach level. The old steps were a steeper set, and hit bottom farther back. The Huntington Beach Pier bank was where the little wall is now, on the left side of the steps, at the bottom. There was a long, two level parking lot where the amphitheater and parking area are now. The pier bank rose up about 3 1/2 feet from the concrete under the pier, to the lower level of the parking lot. The bank had been sessioned by skateboarders through the 1970's and into the early 1980's. Then huge posts were put into the bank, and a gigantic chain ran through the posts near the bottom, to keep skateboarders and bike riders from riding the bank.
Downtown Huntington Beach was a much different place in 1987. Many of the buildings on Main Street are still there, from that era, the ones made of bricks. Jack's Surf Shop was on the north corner of PCH and Main, as it is today, though it was a smaller shop. Huntington Surf & Sport was also on the same side of the street, half a block inland, not on the opposite corner, as it is now. That south corner of PCH and Mani was an empty lot in the late 1980's. Jan's smoothie shop was in the back of Huntington Surf & Sport. Perq's bar was there then, and so was the Longboard, on the second block. There was a liquor store on the corner of Main and Walnut. About where the fountain is now, on the south side of the second block of Main Street, was a indie record shop called The Electric Chair. It was a small shop, with folding tables topped with milk crates full of record albums, "vinyl" as most people call them today. That whole second block of Main street, on the south side, where the fountain is, looked like the other side of the street, old, one or two story brick buildings, probably going back to the oil boom days of the 1920's.
Downtown Huntington Beach was much quieter then, none of the current hotels were in that area in the 1980's, just one small motel, south of the pier, on the inland side of PCH. There were far fewer shops, and more oil pumps, continuously rocking up and down, on lots all over downtown. Most of them have since been capped off, and covered by houses or condos. Skateboarders regularly skated the P.O. curb, a freestanding painted curb, which was where the small wall is now, behind the Post office, next to the Rockin' Fig surf shop.
There were only about 5 bars, including Perq's and the Longboard. In the 1980's, Newport Beach was the cool city then, and people would often take a taxi to the bars around the Newport Pier to go party on the weekends. Huntington Beach was a dirty little surf town with empty lots and oil pumps, running up most of Pacific Coast Highway, on lots full of condos and tall skinny houses today. One of those empty lots is now for sale for almost $4 million, I just looked it up on Zillow.
Oil was discovered in downtown Huntington Beach in 1920, near Huntington High School, and the oil wells, and oil workers in the early days, made H.B. less desirable by wealthy people looking for a beach house. So the oil wells and pumps made Huntington Beach the "dirty beach city," which kept much of it from being developed, up into the 1990's and early 2000's. Since H.B. was less popular to rich folk for several decades, because of all the oil pumps, rent was cheaper.
The Huntington Beach I moved into, in 1987, was a working class beach town, full of surfers, construction workers, bartenders, servers, and a lot of action sports people. As we moved into the 1990's, a lot of strippers and later porn stars moved to H.B.. I think we can thank Damian Sanders, Jon Huntington, and the snowboard/motocross crew that started the Pimp n' Ho Ball as a house party, for that. But that's a story for a different day.
If Newport Beach was the Beverly Hills of Orange County, Huntington Beach was where the working class people, and many of the creative and entrepreneurial people of surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX, and motocross lived. It had a completely different vibe than Newport Beach until the early 2000's, when Huntington Beach was deemed cool by hipsters, and the Yuppie hoards moved in. I was driving a taxi in Huntington Beach much of that time, and if you're reading this, I probably drove your drunk ass home from Main Street once or twice. By the turn of the millennium, Huntington Beach was the SoCal beach city with the most undeveloped land, thanks to all those oil wells from the 1920's. In the real estate boom of the late 90's and early 2000's, the H.B. oils wells got capped and McMansions and condos sprang up like mushrooms. And rent and home prices SOARED. The hotels and a lot more trendy shops soon followed. Welcome to Irvine by the Sea. A whole different group of people moved into Huntington Beach. 
In addition to Pierre, Don, Hans, and Jeremy practicing at the Huntington Beach Pier, other freestyle skaters like Per Welinder and Bob Schmelzer, as well as street skaters like Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, and a pack of locals, came by to skate on a regular basis. Here's Bob Schmelzer on a street board in 1986, with a layback on the H.B. Pier bank, under the big chain. This is from the August 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine (page 8), a Windy Osborn photo, I believe. This is what the pier bank looked like in 1987 and 1988, in my early years riding there.
One weekend in the spring of 1989, I rolled down to the Huntington Beach Pier on a Saturday morning, and a few skaters were skating the pier bank. The huge chain blocking it off had disappeared. As a BMX freestyler who was always up for a good bank session, I joined in, probably throwing a backside boneless (can-can footplant) first. Then I started trying some kickturns and other stuff. Game on! The Huntington Beach Pier Bank, long blocked by the monster chain, was back in play.
At that time, I lived way up on the north side of Huntington Beach, near Bolsa Chica and Warner. I didn't have a car then, so I would either take buses up PCH, and into Costa Mesa, to work at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company. Or I'd make a 10 mile ride on my BMX bike, riding the entire 8.3 mile length of the H.B. bike path, with a headwind, as part of my route.
I rode right by the pier going to and from work, when I rode my bike. Once the chain was down, the nightly sessions were on, in the spring of 1989, and they were some awesome sessions. Some times I'd ride the bike path home, and other days I'd ride down the 19th street hill in Costa Mesa, through the what later became the Sheep Hills BMX jumps area, and I'd hit a bunch of little streets spots, and then the pier bank, on the way home. Those nights it was a three or four hour ride home, with a bunch of little sessions along the way.
Every single night that I rode up to the pier bank, there would usually be one or two, maybe three or four street skaters, sessioning the bank. Some of them were guys I knew from Vision, both sponsored skaters or workers that skated. Sometimes they were people I didn't know. Every once in a while, it would be just me, and I'd listen to Ramones Mania on my Walkman, which I carried in my Vision hip pack, and I'd session alone for an hour or more.
It was a really mellow bank for bike riding, but it was fun to session. As weird as it sounds today, almost no one wandered by the lower part of the pier in those days during the week. A few bike riders rode up and down the bike path, and maybe a runner or two. The H.B. police, oddly, left us alone down there. I think once or twice a motorcycle cop rolled up the bike path and checked us out. I sort of remember them asking if we knew what happened to the chain. If they told us to leave, we'd take off, and just come back the next night. We weren't really bothering anyone down on the bank, so the sessions continued. Then one night, I rolled up, ready for another session... and the chain was back up. Game off.
We were all bummed. The rumor at the time was that a couple of local skaters had cut down the 300 pound chain, and dragged it out onto the beach, 100 feet away, and buried it. But beaches attract all kinds of people, including metal detector guys, looking for coins and gold rings. Somebody found the chain, told the cops, and the session stopping monster chain was back. The Pier Bank sessions stopped.
Life went on, I still went down to ride at the pier nearly every weekend, unless there was a contest somewhere. I still went street riding on the way home from work, just hitting other spots, along the way. Then, about a month or so after the chain went up, I rolled up to the pier, and someone was skating the pier bank again, they chain had once again disappeared. The nightly and weekend sessions began again. 
This is me, doing one of the tricks I learned at the H.B. Pier Bank, a 270 bunnyhop to 90 hop to rollback and 180 out. It wasn't that hard, just a fun little bank trick. This is on a bank in San Diego, while on a video shoot with Eddie Roman, for my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend (36:22). In 1986, while at a contest in Canada, I saw Eddie Fiola do a trick he called the Expo. He'd flyout on the quarterpipe, and land sideways on the deck, on both wheels. He'd hop on both wheels, once or twice, and then hop back into the ramp, turning 90 degrees, and landing fakie, going in backwards. It looked pretty gnarly, a cooltrick at that time. This trick was inspired by the Expo. Doing a 90 on a bank, then 90 back in fakie, was pretty easy. So I turned it into a 270, and it became a fun little bank trick.
None of us were sure if the chain was going to reappear, and shut down the pier bank again, so the two or three dozen skaters that sessioned the bank from time to time, made the most of it. Other BMXers showed up once in a while, but most of the time it was me and a couple of skaters, during the weeknight sessions. Sometimes on the weekends, there would be ten or more skaters hitting the bank.
In time, after a month or two, rumor got around that the city probably wouldn't find the chain again. The story was that the guys who took the chain down dragged that 300 pound beast way out under the pier, during a low tide, into about chest deep water, and then dove down and worked it into the sand, burying it under water, the best they could. To the best of my knowledge, that's where the chain has been ever since, 100 yards or more out from the bike path, 20 or 30 yards past the low tide water line, under the center of the pier. If that rumor was true, it has probably worked deep into the sand and mud, in the 35 years since. While the metal detector guys looking for money and treasure scour the whole beach area every week, they didn't go chest or neck deep into the waves looking for rings and coins. So the chain is probably slowly rusting away in the silt.
I'm sure the city thought it was B.S. when the chain disappeared again. They had no idea how determined a couple of skateboarders can be to open up a great session spot. I forget the actual dates, but from about late May or early June, the pier bank was open to ride and skate, until well into the fall. I think the city finally bought a new chain, and installed it, in late September or October. The skating and bike riding on the bank went on all summer of 1989.
That was a time when all BMX tricks were brake tricks, but I got sick of working on my bike at some point, since I've always been a lousy mechanic. So I rode brakeless for much of that spring and part of the summer. During those sessions on the H.B. Pier Bank, I learned a bunch of weird little bank variations. I learned foot jam nosepicks, tailtap 540s, and no footed bunnyhops to fakie. None of those are very hard, but they were fun tricks, and the no footed bunnyhops wrecked my shins, because I slipped my pedals a lot learning that trick. I also started jumping out of the bank, doing 180's a lot. They were tiny, only a few inches off the ground, but fun.
After a while, I started doing a little bunnyhop when I did the 180 out of the rollbacks. That turned them into BMX half Cabs, which the skaters often thought were cool. In that era, I was actually riding with skateboarders more than I was riding with BMXers, so I did some skateboard tricks on my bike. I was already doing backside bonelesses, a can-can footplant on a bank, but in a more sweeping movement than the vert version of that trick. I learned a no-comply on a bike, where a skater did a footplant to 180. So half Cabs (half a Caballerial- a fakie 360 air on vert, then later on flat ground) were another skate trick on a bike.
After a while, I tried to twist a lookback while doing the 180 jumps. They were far from fully clicked, but were partially twisted. Then I started trying lookbacks in the half Cabs. I could do really small 180 bunnyhops, hopping off of both tires, and spinning really quickly, so I could keep a lot of speed going backwards. I rode a freewheel, so I had to back pedal faster than the cranks would spin backwards on their own.
Unlike today's freecoaster riders, the natural back pedaling of the cranks gave me and edge doing half Cabs. I could catch the pedal, and really get leverage to get some pop in a half Cab. So those started on the pier bank in the summer of 1989. Eventually, I could do my tiny 180 bunnyhops at nearly a full sprint, and then land rolling backwards at real speed. Then I could hop the half Cabs farther and farther. I was doing 6 to 8 foot half Cabs by late 1989 or so, and fairly clicked lookback half Cabs. But those weren't even considered a trick then. Eddie Roman and maybe a couple of the San Diego guys did BMX half Cabs off ledges, but they were rarely seen by anyone. The real video era of street riding was just beginning. So no one else did them, and I didn't even bother to shoot video of them when I made The Ultimate Weekend video in 1990, because I didn't think they were a big deal. Lookback half Cabs were just some goofy trick I did, and nobody else. But that was the best trick of mine that was spawned from all of those sessions at the Huntington Beach Pier bank.
One more weird story from those sessions. I was riding alone at the pier bank one night, well into the summer of 1989, and it was fully dark out, so it was probably after 9 pm or so. I heard a skateboard coming up the bike path from the north. Around the bush on the corner of the bike path came this kid, knee riding on a skateboard, pushing with one leg, hands on the front of the board.
At first glance, I thought it was a little kid, and wondered who was with him. But it turned out to be a young guy of maybe 18 to 20 years old, I think. I think he asked if I minded if he skated the bank, and I said something like, "Sure go for it." And that's when I noticed. His lower legs were deformed, his feet pointed backwards, his legs were almost like a cricket, bending in a weird way. His lower body was totally built wrong, a birth defect, obviously. But he pushed up to the bank, pushing with one back leg, hands on the nose of the board. Then he put a hand down on the bank, sort of a beanplant/or boneless type thing, and picked up the board and spun it around, like a varial.
The kid had obviously been skating for quite a while, and he had a whole series of handplant and board flipping tricks, that worked for his unusual, mutated body. And the kid was good. This kid I'd never seen before, never heard of before, with a body shaped liked none I'd ever seen... he was a skater. So we sessioned together, taking turns hitting the bank, for maybe 45 minutes or so. When he did something cool, I'd say, "Yeah!," and he did the same to me. He was just another skater, who was built in a really weird way, and he had developed a whole series of tricks that worked for his body. They were all things that would be nearly impossible for a normal bodied person to pull off.
That night, at the pier bank, I learned why there are no paralympics in skateboarding (or BMX). There are only people, skaters, or even BMXers, with a different body shape, people you'd never want to play a game of SKATE or BIKE against. The kid amazed me, reminding me that we're all fucked up in one way or another, and we started skating or BMX freestyle to help deal with it. His issues seemed mostly physical, while most of us were kinda fucked up in the head from our crazy families, childhood trauma, or whatever. "Normal" people didn't skate or ride BMX back then.
After a while, he was done skating, and he just said, "Later," or something like that, and pushed back around the corner, into the darkness, heading north on the bike path. The crazy part is that the only things that way were the one condo complex by the beach, a couple hundred yards away, or the parking lot. I couldn't figure out where that kid came from, in the dark that night, or where he headed back to. He was alone, he wouldn't be able to drive a car. He just came out of nowhere, we sessioned the bank together, and then he disappeared into the darkness. I didn't get his name, and I've never heard of a skater like that from anyone else. No one else seemed to have seen or heard of the guy. That became one of my great memories of that summer, riding the Huntington Beach Pier Bank.
These are my best memories of one of my favorite eras in 20 years of BMX freestyle riding, all the cool sessions at the Huntington Beach Pier Bank in the spring and summer of 1989.
This skateboard documentary, Downhill Motion, is dated at 1975 on YouTube, and has some great mid-1970's California skateboard film in it. There's even a couple of BMX riders riding a pool with skaters, at one point. But right in the beginning, at 1:43, you can see several kids sessioning the Huntington Beach Pier bank, probably in 1974 or 1975. Jay Adams, one of the Z-Boys from Venice Beach, is in there, in his blond hair and dark blue Zephyr T-shirt, along with another Zephyr skater. There was probably a contest in H.B. that day, bringing skaters from around SoCal together. The really young kid you see skating in this film is Kele Rosecrans.
This blog is rolling up to the 1,000 blog post milestone, since I started it in 2017. This is post #997
I've been doing a lot of writing on a platform designed for writers, called Substack. Check it out:
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