If you build it, they will come... and ride

Did you know that Cleveland, Ohio, recovering industrial city, has become a destination for mountain bike riders?  When I talk about building scenes and how those scenes can turn into businesses (among other things), this is what I'm talking about. 

In late 2004, a mountain bike rider and good carpenter, Ray Petro was bummed about not being able to ride his mountain bike all winter.  So he rented a room in an empty factory, and built wooden mountain bike obstacles.  The first ones were pretty simple.  But the idea took off.  It turns out there are a lot of mountain bike riders, and some BMXers, who wanted to ride during the winter as well.  According to Wikipedia, Ray took $50,000 in savings, raised $25,000 more, and went all in on his idea of an indoor MTB riding spot during the winter months. 

Ray's MTB in Cleveland now fills 92,000 square feet of old factory buildings, attracts thousands of riders a year, and has people traveling from across the country to ride there.  Every year Ray and his crew rebuild it, putting in new lines and obstacles.  After the success in Cleveland, Ray teamed up with Trek Bikes to open a second mountain bike park in Milwaukee, WI.  It was popular for several years, but closed in 2016 due to a dispute with the building's owners.  The original park is going strong. 

With a love for his sport, some savings, and carpentry skills, Ray created more than wooden paths for MTB riders, he created a scene.  He created a great space for mountain bikers and BMXers to come together.  In one video he referred to it as "a big bicycle party."  As an old BMX guy, I think this is one of the greatest ways to recycle old, empty buildings that I've seen.  Props to Ray for following his dream and getting so many people psyched to ride in the Midwest. 

Here are a bunch of links of people riding at Ray's MTB in Cleveland:
2010 Local Cleveland TV segment on Ray's
Interview with Ray at Grand Opening of Ray's in Milwaukee 
BMX phenom Scotty Cranmer at Ray's (1:21 in clip)
My favorite Ray's "Odd Couple Contest" video

Welcome to the Retail Crash... MALLPOCALYPSE

The Oak Hollow Mall in Highpoint, North Carolina just closed a few days ago.  As I wrote a couple of posts ago, I happened to wander through the huge, empty, but still clean and intact mall a week before its demise.  The recent Business Insider clip above gives a good synopsis of why so many malls are dying.  No one seems to know just how many malls have died at this point.  Obviously Amazon.com and other online shopping sites are part of this picture.  But they're not the whole story.  Here's some info to the Retail Apocalypse I've found.

There were about 1100 enclosed malls in the U.S..  Four hundred of those malls have closed already, like Oak Hollow, or are expected to close in the next few years.  There are about 300 "high performing" malls, which seem to be mostly the high end malls, which are still doing well.  The remaining 400 malls are questionable but alive at this point.  A massive shift in retail shopping habits seems to be the main factor in this huge Retail Apocalypse.  Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT's) own about half of the U.S. malls, so this will be a huge hit to them.

In addition to the hundreds of malls and retails stores that have closed since The Great Recession in 2008, hundreds more are scheduled to close soon, which will put even more pressure on struggling malls and shopping centers.  Here's a partial list:

-Macy's announced it will close 100 stores in August 2016.   Three have closed, 63 more are scheduled to close in early 2017.  Management expects those store closings to save Macy's $550 million.
-Sears/Kmart is closing 150 combined stores soon (as of January 2017)
-Walmart has closed 269 stores worldwide, 154 in the U.S..  (Jan.2016)
-J.C. Penney has actually made a bit of a comeback in the last couple of years, but plans to close up to 140 stores in the U.S. to continue streamlining its business.
-Aeropostale went into bankruptcy in May of 2016, and has already closed 113 stores.
-H H Gregg has closed or is closing 88 stores.
-Abercrombie & Fitch is closing 60 stores.
-The Limited has closed all 250 stores.
-Crocs is closing 160 stores.
-Wet Seal is closing 171 stores.
-American Apparel is closing 110 stores.
-BCBG is closing 120 stores.
-CVS is closing 70 stores.
-Family Christian (bookstores) is closing 240 stores.
Pac Sun is out of bankruptcy after closing 110 to 120 stores so far.

Get this, the German supermarket Lidl is OPENING 150 stores in the U. S., spurred on by the success of German grocer Aldi (which is an awesome store).


The vast majority of the stores and malls closed or closing are in rural and small town America.  Yeah, all those people that voted for Trump because they can't find local jobs are about to lose tens of thousands more local jobs and tens or hundreds of millions in local revenue.  Rural America, by and large, is dying in the tech heavy 21st century.  This is a HUGE issue we need to address as a nation.  These store closings will have a huge ripple effect on other chain stores because of reduced foot traffic to malls and shopping centers.  I think we're likely to head into another recession soon.  That's just a hunch.  We'll see.

We, as a country, have far more square feet of retail space per person than other developed countries.  A report in Business Insider says we have 23.5 square feet of retail space per person in the U.S., compared to 16.4 in Canada and 11.1 in Australia.  Another report I found claimed 48 sq.ft of retail space per American.  In any case, it's a lot, and millions of square feet of retail space under roof is either already empty or will son be empty.

What should we do will all those empty buildings?  If you have a good idea, now's the time, because those retail stores will be available for pennies on the dollar of their former value.  

The website deadmalls.com writes about the closed malls.  Their list contains well over a hundred.

Source info:
Business Insider article
Retail stores closing- Clark.com
Hundreds of shopping malls at risk- Clark.com 

Still not sure this is a problem?  Check this out:

Major Retail Stores closing by the hundreds

Macy's, Sear's/Kmart, Radio Shack and other once retail chains closing lots MORE stores in 2017.  Now what?

Death of a Mall

I took my mom to a doctor's appointment in High Point (NC) Thursday, and headed to McDonald's to get a drink and do a little writing while she was there.  It happened to be the McDonald's on the periphery of Oak Hollow Mall.  I was drawing a blank on the writing, and had this urge to go into the mall.  So I grabbed a refill and headed over.  I didn't have a camera, I don't even have a smart phone these days.  As luck would have it, I parked a few spaces away from where the guy in this video parked.

I was met at the mall entrance by a sheet of paper taped on each door.  In a couple of paragraphs, the mall ownership said that Dillard's, the last anchor store, was moving, and that the whole mall would close in about a week.  So I wandered end to end, much like the guy in this video.  I saw about a dozen people near the only restaurant in the food court, a soul food place.  I saw about a dozen more people in the whole mall, all of them were either employees or elderly mall walkers.

In front of one of about five stores still open, a store manager leaned against the railing outside her shop, scrolling through her phone.  That's what's happening in a picture, I thought.  The era of huge malls filled with thousands of shoppers is fading.  We now live in a world where people can buy nearly anything with a few taps on their phone, tablet, or laptop, and have the item delivered to their door.

When I moved to North Carolina in late 2008, as the economy was collapsing, my parents took me to Oak Hollow a couple of times.  It was about half empty then.  It seemed so weird to me that a mall, the foundation of consumerism in my lifetime, could possibly go under.  In the eight years since, things have only gotten worse for malls.  Hundreds of them have closed down in the U.S., I've heard.  With the malls go the jobs, the income for the community, and local tax dollars, among other things.

I walked around the mall, thinking of the thriving malls of my childhood, and an abandoned mall in Ohio I saw recently on the Viceland TV show Abandoned.  We live in a world cluttered with empty factories and retail space.  While the (mostly) old white men running our country argue about how to try to bring back the good paying manufacturing jobs of decades ago, millions of other jobs are being lost to all kinds of technology.  Finding well paying work for people is one of the huge and overlooked issues of our country right now.

Is there anything that could bring Oak Hollow Mall and others like it back to life?  What few people know is that the city of Highpoint paid $400,000 to an urban planner named Adres Duany a couple years ago to help them figure out how help the city survive and hopefully thrive again.  His team suggested relaxing the zoning at Oak Hollow, and allowing live/work spaces for artists and entrepreneurs.  He even suggest bringing in lots of big shipping containers and letting people turn those into work/live spaces as well.  He said the mall would best serve the city as a creative and high tech business incubator.  It was a brilliant idea.

Like many brilliant ideas, the civic leaders of Highpoint completely blew it off.  Now the mall is closing, the city is still struggling, and a huge abandoned property will start attracting all kinds of people for sketchy reasons.  The lack of understanding of what's really happening in our country is one of our biggest problems right now.  Because of this, hundreds of towns and cities of the Industrial Age are struggling, if not actually dying.  Old ideas won't solve this problem.

I'm writing a book with many of my crazy stories from taxi driving and lessons learned in my first 50 years.  You can pre-order a copy on my crowdfunding page here: Level 5: Getting Shot Sucks... and other things I've learned in 50 years

Don't Mess With the Women of Huntington Beach

The woman in I'm writing about looked a lot like the woman in the car at :50 in this clip.


It was a slow Tuesday evening in downtown Huntington Beach.  I think it was the summer of 2003.  I picked up a couple guys in front of Perq's in my taxi, and was headed slowly inland on Main Street to drop them off.  As we neared the bike shop at Orange Street, we saw a young couple, with what I called the "Rockabilly look" back then.  The guy was in new Levi's, a white T-shirt, and had his hair slicked back.  His girlfriend was in a beige print retro dress, had jet black hair with bangs, two inch heels, and her bright red lipstick was shining.  It looked like the couple was walking home after a trip to one of the bars. 


In front of the couple were two guys with dark hair and naturally tan skin, maybe Indian or Persian guys from Irvine, I thought.  The two guys were walking backwards in front of the couple, waving their hands around like gangstas, and obviously giving the couple a hard time.  The couple seemed to be trying to ignore the two guys.  As I got within about 80 feet of the couple, the woman in the dress stepped forward and punched one of the guys in the face.  He dropped to the ground.  Then her boyfriend stepped forward and dropped the other guy, also with a single punch.  "That's why you don't mess with the girls in Huntington Beach," I said to the two passengers in my cab.  We all started laughing. 


I drove past the couple and the two guys on the ground, and went another mile inland to drop my passengers off.  On my way back down Main Street, I was surprised to see not only police cars, but an ambulance where the "fight" had been.  The Rockabilly couple was sitting on the curb talking to the police, and one of the guys who had been harassing them was getting loaded into the ambulance.  That may just have been the best thing I've ever seen as a taxi driver. 


This is just one of the taxi fight stories that will be in my upcoming DIY book, Level 5: Getting Shot Sucks.  Click the link to pre-order a copy.  And don't talk shit in downtown Huntington Beach, even to the women.

Annoying Rodney Mullen in 1986

In the last post, I told about meeting Rodney in August of 1986, and shared the short interview I did with him, along with a ton of links.  Here's a bit more.

In those days right after meeting Rodney, Lew spent his spare time at work trying to figure out some trick that Rodney wouldn't be able to do.  Then Lew and I would head down to The Spot in Redondo for our nightly sessions.  After we'd been riding for an hour or two, Rodney would roll up on this black, rickety beach cruiser he called Agnes.  He'd tape his fingers and get ready to skate.  Then he'd get to practicing.

Up until that time, every BMX freestyler or skater I'd met went out and sessioned.  We'd ride around, try some old tricks.  Go get something to drink.  Hang out for a while and heckle our friends, and then maybe try some new trick for a bit.  Rodney PRACTICED.  He would warm-up and then skate non-stop in a little area for 2 1/2 or 3 hours.  In that time, he MIGHT step off his board two or three times back then.  The word "perfectionist" doesn't even begin to describe it.  It was like watching an Olympic athlete training on a skateboard.

After Lew and I were tired out.  We'd roll over and watch Rodney for a bit.  Then Lew would challenge Rodney with his impossible trick idea of the day.  The only one I remember was when he asked Rodney to pop an ollie and then land in a one wheel wheelie.  Rodney immediately replied, "I don't have the balance for wheelies."  Really.  Then he tried the trick.  He was a freestyle skater, and they rode their trucks so tight that there was almost no movement.  On the second try, Rodney landed on one back wheel and set it down pretty quick.  On the third attempt, Rodney snapped an ollie, landed directly on one back wheel, and then rolled a good fifteen feet before setting the other wheels down. After five or six days of thinking up "impossible" skate tricks, and watching Rodney land every one in a few tries, Lew gave up.

He would usually talk to Rodney a minute or two when done riding, and then head home.  I started hanging out longer watching Rodney, and we'd wind up talking for a bit.  One of the first nights, Rodney let me try his board.  I rolled about four feet then fell off because the trucks were so tight.  He laughed.  A couple nights later, Rodney showed me how to do the original kickflips.  Before he did ollie kickflips, he did them as a pressure flip.  He'd start with both feet pointing forward on the board, and then press down to one side.  The board would flip sideways and he'd land on it in a normal stance.  With his help, I landed a couple that first night on his board.

One night I finished my session, and headed up to the pier to get a Coke.  Riding back down the bike path, towards where Rodney was skating, I heard another skater rolling through the parking garage on my right.  The sounds got closer until some dark haired kid on a street board ollied the curb high, four foot wide concrete island between the parking garage and the bike path.  "That must be that Gonz guy," I thought to myself, as he skated up the bike path towards Rodney.  It was.  I had heard Lew and Andy Jenkins talk about Mark Gonzales, THE street skater then in 1986, although Tommy Guerrero was a close second.  Mark rolled up to Rodney, and they started talking.  I decided to sit on one of the concrete benches and hang out as the two of them talked.  They start comparing tricks, and at one point, Rodney started showing Mark how to do ollie impossibles.  Nobody did those on the big street board then.  Mark came pretty close, but never landed one that I saw.  They went on trying different stuff as I chilled with my Coke 50 feet away.  Mark skated off after a while, Rodney went back to his intense practicing, and I headed home.

A few days later, Lew and I were both talking to Rodney, who was staying with older freestyle skater Steve Rocco at the time.  Rodney mentioned that Rocco absolutely HATED BMXers.  Lew replied, "You know, we have a bunch of I heart BMX stickers at work that some guy gave us."  We all decided it would be hilarious to give Rodney a pack of 50 of those and let him stick them all over Rocco's house.  The next day Lew gave Rodney the stickers, and we all brainstormed crazy places to stick them.  Rodney got to work on Operation I Heart BMX the next day.  He plastered all 50 all over Rocco's house, including one right smack in the center of a canvas Rocco was about to paint.  According to Rodney, Rocco went ballistic and searched the house ripping them up.  But he didn't find all of them.  When Rodney headed back to Florida a couple weeks later, there were still BMX stickers he hadn't found.  We all got a good laugh out of that.  What's even more funny is that when Rodney flew back out to stay with Rocco about three months later, Rocco found two stickers in places he never thought to look, and flipped out again.  I <3 BMX, but Steve Rocco doesn't.

In those few weeks hanging out with Rodney, I saw him learn some new tricks.  Fingerflip daffy ollies (later called fingerflip ollie airwalks), half flip underflips, and handstands to inward flips to board.  That's in addition to the double kickflips, helipops (flat ground Caballerial ollie), 720 shove-its, 360 flips, and all the other stuff he was doing then.  He even mentioned that Stacy Peralta, creator of the Bones Brigade, was trying to talk him into doing some street skating.  Rodney said he had no intentions of ever doing that.  And then Mark Ternasky slowly and steadily talked Rodney into it.  then Rodney Mullen completely changed the game in tech street skating.  For years afterward, every time a young street skater told me he wanted to get sponsored, I gave him the same answer.  "Go watch old Rodney Mullen videos, pick three Rodney tricks that no one does, and learn them down a five step."  No one ever actually did it.  But it would still work today.

30 years ago I met this kid name Rodney Mullen...

This clip above is the legendary and innovative skateboarder Rodney Mullen all you skaters know of, the guy who invented most of the elemental tricks street skaters rely on.  But this is the Rodney Mullen my roommate Lew introduced me to in August of 1986 at The Spot in Redondo Beach, California.  The thing about rolling up on some skater or BMXer is that you never know what that kid is going to do in the next 20 or 30 years.

Rodney talked in a kind of a weird, soft voice.  His board was flat and he put lots of wood screws in the ends of his board so it wouldn't delam too quick when doing pogos.  He pulled his socks all the way up to his knees, and tucked them into his knee pads.  Again, that helped on the pogo tricks.  He had already invented the flat ground ollie, the pressure flip style kickflip, the ollie kickflip, the 360 flip, the double kickflip, the ollie impossible (technically a pressure flip) and a bunch of other stuff.  He was the 8 or 9 time world champ of freestyle skateboarding.  He was the undisputed top freestyle skater in the Golden Age of vert skating.

 I started hanging out after I was done riding my bike and watching Rodney skate.  We'd hang out and talk when he was done.  After a while, he started asking me how a new trick looked or if this trick should follow that trick in his next contest routine.  We were both wound pretty tight, and we hit it off.

I was stoked when the crew at FREESTYLIN' said I could do a little interview with him.  At the ripe old age of 19, Rodney was heading back off to college and debating between a future in engineering or medicine.  He was staying nearby in Hermosa Beach at the home of then washed up freestyle skater Steve Rocco.  This was about a year before the whole Santa Monica Airlines/World Industries idea happened. The interview landed on page 56 of the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'  Here it is:

Steve: "First of all, let's get some basic background on you.  Age, how long have you been skating, sponsors, etc."
Rodney: "I'm 19 years old and I've been skating for 9 1/2 years.  I go to school at the University of Florida.  I skate for fun.  Oh, and I'm sponsored by Powell-Peralta, Independent, Sundeck, Swatch, Style Eyes, and... that's it... I think."
Steve: "Speaking of school, what are you majoring in?"
Rodney: I don't know, I've been in engineering.  It's kind of weird... thinking about growing up.  I'm going to check out medical school, 'cause my grades are okay.  Plus my dad says I should try it, 'cause engineers work to hard for their money."
Steve: "I heard you have like a 4.0 average."
Rodney: "Yeah, it's like 3.98 now, I think, 'cause I got a B+ in physics, but it's still okay."
Steve: "Yeah, that's okay (laughter)."
Rodney: "I can't stand humanities, though!  I can get through all the physics and calculus, but..."
Steve: "How long do you plan to keep skating?"
Rodney: "I don't think about it, it's sort of scary.  Just as long as my body will take it.  I'll skate forever, just playing around.  As far as pushing hard goes, I don't know."
Windy (Osborn, the FREESTYLIN' photographer): "How many hours a day do you skate?"
Rodney: "About three."
Windy: "Do you have a special place you skate at?""
Rodney: "At home (in Florida), there's this church where I skate.  It's perfectly lit and it's just heaven."
Windy: "At night, right?"
Rodney: "Yeah."
Steve: "This place (Redondo Pier-The Spot) is pretty good, too."
Rodney: "Yeah, it's nice here."
Steve: "Okay, let's get into some 'Lew type questions.'  What's your favorite smell?"
Rodney: (Laughter) "Uhm... rain.  No, uhm... kittens."
Windy: "You can smell the rain?"
Rodney: "Yeah."
Steve: "Oh, let's see... any other profound thoughts?"
Rodney: "Just try to be an individual when you skate.  Don't look at others, don't think about others... it just brings you down."
Steve: "So do whatever you think?"
Rodney: "It comes out of you... that's how it gets good."
Steve: "Any favorite music, groups, anything like that?"
Rodney: "I'm getting more diverse now, I guess.  Joy Division is my all time favorite.  New Order.  I like Stiff Little Fingers, Marginal Man I like now, and Beethoven and Vivaldi."
Steve: "Pretty wide range."
Rodney: "Yeah, I guess so.  That's about it."
Steve: "My trademark question here:  What is the meaning of life?"
Rodney:  The meaning of life is... kittens playing with yarn."
(Long pause)
( Windy laughs)
Steve: "Okay, thanks. (Click).

This was the first and only interview I did at my short stint at FREESTYLIN'.  I'd done a bunch of interviews for my zine, but never a real magazine.  My interviewing skills left a lot to be desired.  When Rodney said the meaning of life was "kittens playing with yarn," I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard.  But I never forgot it.  As the years have passed, I've come to think he was right on the mark. 

 Rodney on video:
Rodney in 1980 in San Diego
Rodney and Stacy Peralta in 1980
Rodney skating the banks at Del Mar in 1983
Rodney at Del Mar freestyle contest in 1984
Rodney at Del Mar in 1985 (rare bail)
The Bones Brigade Video Show ( 1984- Powell-Peralta) 8:04, 22:59
Bones Brigade 2: Future Primitive (1985-Powell Peralta) 19:58, 41:05, 41:54
Rodney at Oceanside contest (1986- Unreel Productions) 
Bones 3: The Search for Animal Chin (1987-Powell-Peralta) 41:12, 42:16, 43:57
Bones 4: Public Domain (1988- Powell-Peralta) 21:26- Triple kickflip
Rubbish Heap (1989- World Industries) He's at The Spot in Redondo (BMXers know) at :39, and is dragged kicking and screaming into street skating at the end
Questionable (Plan B- 1992)
Virtual Reality (Plan B- 1993)
Second Hand Smoke (Plan B- 1994) The beginning of this clip was shot at the exact spot where Windy Osborn and I did the photo shoot and interview above for FREESTYLIN'
 Rodney Mullen vs. Daewon Song (1997- Dwindle Distribution)
Rodney Mullen vs. Daewon Song Round 2 (1999- Dwindle Distribution) at :37 you can see the photo Rodney got on the issue of  FREESTYLIN' that my interview with him was in.
Opinion (2001-Globe Shoes)
Rodney Mullen vs. Daewon Song Round 3 (2004- Almost)
The Man Who Souled The World (2007- Big Entertainment/Whyte House Productions)4:43, 13:46, 17:30, 20:14, 23:19, 31:02, 34:58, 38:37, 39:35, 40:32, 41:12, 43:51, 44:06, 1:00:20, 1:01:05, 1:02:17, 1:02:53, 1:04:05, 1:07:14, 1:08:10, 1:09:19, 1:15:43, 1:19:17, 1:20:40
United by Fate (2008- Globe Shoes) 4:01
Rodney Mullen 2008 (raw footage) session
Rodney Mullen on Innovation (2012- The Smithsonian's Lemelson Center)
Rodney Mullen sits down with Tony Hawk (2012- RIDE Channel)
Rodney Mullen- From The Ground Up (2013)
Rodney Mullen and Tony Hawk in conversation (2013- Innoskate/Smithsonian's Lemelson Center)
How Context Shapes Content (2013- TEDx USC)
On Getting Up Again (2013- TEDx Orange Coast)
Rodney's Bones 1 video outtakes, narrated much later by Stacy Peralta
Crazy Rodney stories from Bones Brigade documentary
Rodney Mullen- A Beautiful Mind (2014- The Berrics)
Pop An Ollie And Inovate (2015?- TED Talk)
Rodney  (2016-Vogue)

I'm touring the country this year on The White Bear's Let's Make a Scene Tour, spreading ideas that your city's future depends partly on it's art, music, and action sports scenes.  To learn more, or get me to your shop or city, check out my Go Fund Me campaign at the link above.