Near the end of Bero Road in Lansdowne sits an old patch of concrete with a lot of soul. Tattooed with more than 25 years of graffiti, paved and re-paved, the Lansdowne Skate Park survives, and skaters still come to ride its concrete waves -- though things have changed a bit in the past few years.
When Karl Peck started skating there in '78, he said, the place looked almost nothing like it does now. The concrete bowl was supposed to be part of a larger park to be built in 1980, but an arson fire stopped construction, and the county abandoned the project. This left the park in the hands of the skaters, who picked up the trash, swept up the stones and filled in the cracks with fresh concrete to help keep the place semi-skateable.
Because it was up to the skaters to keep the place clean, Peck said, there was usually plenty of broken glass and trash to swerve around. But there was also no one there to tell them what to do.
"It was very cool, because you just put your board down and skated," Peck said. "You didn't have to sign a waiver, you didn't have to put your helmet and pads on, you didn't have anybody telling you what you could or couldn't do. But it was also the kind of place where you didn't want to be the last guy walking out by yourself."
In the '80s, the park's reputation as a skating place and hangout drew crowds from Washington and Virginia and random carloads of skaters who happened to be passing by on Interstate 95 and had heard of the place. Technically, the park's name is Sandy Hills Skate Park, but the regulars called it Lansdowne Skate Park, which stuck. Kids dropped by to get an hour or two of skating in before school, dragged out kegs at night and skated by moonlight.
Tony Hawk, the Michael Jordan of skateboarding, even came over from California with his posse, the Bones Brigade, to flash some moves. The bowl became a breeding ground for solid skaters, and skateboard companies signed a number of Charm City's finest, including local hero Bucky Lasek.
Skateboarders, bikers and roller-skaters packed Lansdowne Skate Park as the '80s wore on. The first wave of Lansdowne skaters hung up their boards or passed them down to their little brothers. Someone expanded the bowl with a coat of blacktop around some of the edges, which skaters said was smooth at first, but broke into chunks over time.
