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

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

Robots ARE stealing our jobs... Here's one idea on how to deal with that

In this well researched, well thought out TEDx Talk in Vienna, super smart guy Federico Pistono explains how we need to create a new kind of society to deal with the fact that robots and automation are taking over millions of our jobs, and will eventually take almost all of them.  He sees the answer in what he calls an "open source, DIY, self-sustaining world" with technology doing all the drudgery work. 

Its a bold and bright idea.  But here's why it won't work.  What we call "civilized society" is really a small number of people using fear, intimidation, corruption, and propaganda to control a huge population.  His concept would only work if an elite few could find a way to control everyone else, because that's what civilization is.  

Here's where I do agree with Federico, we need to find new forms of human work until the inevitable collapse of society happens.  And it always does.  Pretty pessimistic, but that's the reality we're facing in an age of exponentially growing technological advances. 

How four broke BMXers accidentally turned into a highly influential bike scene

In 1989, at the main bicycle trade show early in the year, a mantra was being said over and over, "BMX is, mountain bikes are the future."  Yes, the mountain bike industry took off.  But BMX racing and BMX freestyle weren't dead, they just had most of the bike industry money siphoned off and put into mountain bikes. Dozens of pro riders in both racing and freestyle suddenly lost sponsors and their income.  But us hardcore riders kept riding. 

Four pro BMX racers rented a two bedroom apartment in Huntington Beach, California, shared bedrooms, and cut living expenses to a bare minimum in order to keep riding and racing.  Those guys, Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers and (I think) Alan Foster, discovered a way to live cheap and keep riding every day as the U.S. slid into one of the longest recessions ever. 

Before long, other riders liked the "BMX House" idea, and those four and a few others rented a four bedroom, two bathroom house on Iroquois street in Westminster, California.  Westminster is the city just inland of Huntington Beach, and is quite a bit cheaper to live in.  For the next four or five years, a series of BMX riders and industry people lived cheap in that house.  The riders named themselves the Pros Of Westminster or P.O.W.'s for short.  They meant no disrespect to the true military P.O.W.'s, but the name fit and it stuck.  In those few short years, the P.O.W. House scene changed BMX riding forever.  The scruffy bunch of guys became known as some of the best dirt jumpers in the world, and some top racers as well as street riders.   I know, I was one of the guys who lived in that house. 

But before I needed a cheap place to live, I was the first video producer to shoot video of the P.O.W. House and riders in their backyard in 1990.  That is the clip above, from my 1990 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend.   None of us had any idea just how big of an influence that crazy house would have in the bike world.  We just wanted to live cheap, ride a lot, and try to pick up women. 

The other day I scoured the You Tube for clips of the guys who lived in that house, and here's the blog post that led to.  Even I was amazed by how much stuff I found.  And even though I've written well over 1500 blog posts about those early BMX days, this post is my most popular ever, getting over 800 page views in less than 48 hours.

This blog is about building, nurturing, and growing creative scenes, and the P.O.W. House legacy is a prime example of how a few people pushing each other to progress can turn into much more in later years.  

Bushwick NYC: From drug dens to art hotspot to gentrification

I just ran across this documentary about a great scene I'd never heard of, Bushwick in Brooklyn.  It's a great documentary about the power of art helping to rebuild a neighborhood, and all the good and bad that comes along with that.  NSFW. 

Christian Hosoi video stills from 1990

Back in 1990, vert skating legend Christian Hosoi teamed with Vision Skateboards on a company called Tuff Skts.  I got the job of following Christian and his crew around with a camera for three days hooting video and then editing a promo video.  The original promo I edited was about seven minutes long.  The women in the Vision promotions department didn't like all of it, so I cut the "official" version down to about 4 1\2 minutes, with background music from Muddy Waters and Bad Brains.  I lost my copies of the promo, so the sole version left I have access to is this super short version with lame music that appeared on Sk8-TV on Nickleodeon in 1990.

 And here's a few stills of video I shot of skater Christian Hosoi in 1990.

 Frontside tail grab at height at his ramp in Echo Park.

 Frontside grind with hands behind his back in a big rectangle pool off the 14 freeway.

 Hosoi was not known for lip tricks, but he'd been working on a few before this photo/video shoot.  Alley-oop nosegrind.

 Frontside 5-0 in a pool next to a crack house in Van Nuys.

 Blunt on the 9 foot section of his ramp.

 Watching his boys ride, rectangle pool off the 14 freeway.  That's John Swope on the right.  We met him at the Van Nuy's pool the day before, where he was doing some of the best Smith grinds I've ever seen.  In 1990, Christian Hosoi partnered with Vision Skateboards in a new company called Tuff Skts.  It didn't last long, but I spent three full days shooting footage with Christian and his guys Block, Joey Tran, and Little Man, and we met John Swope along the way.  On the first day at Christian's house, high on a hill in Echo Park (outside downtown L.A.) surfer Christian Fletcher was hanging out and skating and his dad, surf filmaking legend Herbie Fletcher, was shooting film.  Pretty epic day.

Haiku I wrote when I was nine

g

In the grass I lie
gazing at the blue heavens
I lie wondering

-Steve Emig

If there's a deep, underlying theme to my life, that's it... wondering.