To this day, World Park, which I only went to once, remains one of my favorite skate parks ever. It was nestled in a shitty warehouse in what I think was Lawndale, just between Hawthorne and North Redondo. Private to Rocco team players and various friends of the teams, it was an unsupervised den of inequity/hell. And it saw not only the hellfire wrath of kids without adults (but with spare cash), but also some of the most progressive skating in the early 90's tech boom. Whenever this park showed up in a video part I got really hyped. It was all about the noise. That little warehouse was a huge acoustic drum. The clanking of the metal lips on the ramps, the hollow wooden boxes echoed when wheels touched down, the banshee wails reverberating in the rafters whenever a trick was landed....it enhanced what was already really good footage -usually something you hadn't seen before.
When I went there, I met Daewon Song for the first time, as he was our chaperone for the night. I'm sure I geeked it, but I do remember enjoying the park to its fullest, skating until late in the morning. And I of course remember every single thing he did there that night. Blunts on the hip spine (4" worth of wood/coping), mach 3 tailslides to heelflip out across the box, his usual barrage of manuals, 360 flip fakies on wood laying against the wall almost vertically, and showing us how he could kickflip with his foot in the extreme heelflip position. He also challenged any of us to try and "take him down." Don't you always wrestle before you skate?
That building will never Rest In Peace after what it went through at the expense of Steve Rocco and his band of misfit toys. Small wheels, flip your board, tricks for cash, kick a hole in the door, climb the walls, howl at the moon, claim to be the King of the Wild Things.
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