October 20^th, 2012 – A full crew of hard working skaters showed their faces, and their muscles yesterday at Leeside Tunnel to help build on once again. Another 2 sections were concreted on the big corner pocket quarter and then another section was added in to the long side quarters, this one creating a sick hip. Led by Baxter and Scottish Andy, the crew greeted the concrete truck at 1:30pm and started pushing the the mix down the chute to the boys at the bottom who filled up buckets and wheelbarrow loads for about an hour. It’s definitely getting crazier at Leeside. Way to work together as a team and Git ‘R Done.

I’m not completely sure when the next build will be but the next event is an easy one

Halloween Night – after 6pm

Here’s the entry Video for Store Wars from the Fraser Valley’s favourite Skate Shop – Coastal Riders. Edited by Tony Casano, filled with a ton of super skilled tricks like always. This video only features about half the team but it still kicks ass.

Dustin Locke, Stu Benoit, Dylan Clarke, Sam Hampton, Jordan Zazula, Andrew Classon, Tyler Holm, Magnus Hansen, Derek Mayer and more.

Check it

Leeside Tunnel is kind of like a Child to the old Locals, and we’re the parents. We remember the day it was conceived, the day it was born, when it took his first baby steps, and have watched it grow soooooo much. There’s been good times and bad, and the years of puberty were very difficult, but now young Leeside has really transformed into a solid Teenager ready to graduate into the world of life and become a full blown grown up Man…

It was 1999 when Lee Matasi showed up at our apartment on Hastings Street with the biggest smile I had seen on a guy that was completely straight-edged in years. He told us how he had found this sick tunnel for doing graffiti underneath Hastings Street and he had approached the City of Vancouver about allowing us to build some wood ramps down there. They gave him approval, to paint and to skate. He said he wanted to call it Leeside. Within a week there was a pile of ramps that magically appeared, none of them that awesome. I remember going down there for the first time and there was a tiny manual box, a flat bank, some barricades and a nasty little launch ramp that we were blasting over a garbage can off. Soon afterwards a mini-ramp showed up, and then disappeared again. There was a sick wallride quarterpipe that arrived out of the blue and that was sweet. You could tell that the word was getting around about this place and something big was eventually gonna happen. Then the PM Team went on Tour of BC and Alberta and they had a sick setup of ramps that all fit nicely on top of this big trailer bed, which was used as the centre of their pyramid during the demos. Johnny B Dread, Josh Evin, Eugene Voykin and many others were on that tour and they all showed up one day out of the blue and somehow backed the truck right into the Tunnel donating the entire set of ramps. All of a sudden, we had the most amazing skate park, and just in time for Winter. This place was jumpin’ every day full of some of the best skaters out there at the time. Then this Film Crew was making some TV Show that I can’t remember the name of and they filmed scenes down there for a couple months in the daytime. But the lighting sucked, so they installed all these awesome Spotlights across the entire length of the Tunnel. So now, you could skate there all night long. The skaters took over….

But as time went on, the ramps got damaged, and I moved away to Surrey and stopped taking care of Leeside all the time, and our whole crew wasn’t skating their anymore, and it kind of fizzled out a bit. Unfortunately this opened the doors for the bikers to start making use of it and they demolished the ramps that made us who we were, and built everything higher and higher with holes in the wood just covered by chunks of plywood and it just looked undesirable. There was no style left at Leeside other than the paintings now, and people stopped skating it.

The City of Vancouver was not impressed anymore with the disaster under Hastings Street and they shut the Tunnel down and they cleared out the mess, covered the floor with gravel, and steamrolled it tight. This was right before the time when Tragedy struck – Lee Matasi shot dead. This place was founded by Lee and we did refer to it as Leeside, and when he was killed so abruptly, that was the place that we all went to pay our respects, and it created an uproar. We all loved Lee Matasi as the kind gentle switch hardflippin’ maniac he was, and it hurt us all so much that not only was he gone from our lives, but we couldn’t even celebrate the times we had with him with a skate in the Tunnel. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there that day, and it was all over the news, and the story was very real, and this created a spark in some people’s minds to bring back that place that Lee found that brought so many of us together as friends for life, and they started working.

It was secret for a long time, no one knew it was going on. A little section of gravel would get cleared out and some small concrete obstacles would appear. Then more people would get involved and more gravel would get cleared out, and some bigger concrete obstacles appeared. And at some point, all the gravel that was ignorantly placed across the ground was cleared and put right back into some massive concrete obstacles. Now there supposedly has been an agreement with the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Skateboard Coalition allowing us to build in the Tunnel. And with support, comes more support.

The entire Tunnel known respectably as “Leeside Memorial Tunnel” is now completely covered end to end with concrete ramps – big ones, little ones, nice ones and nasty ones, and you can expect that it is not even close to being over yet. Vans Canada just put down over $16,000 towards the building of the huge corners that are in the midst of construction right now through their DIY Collaboration Projects and a mass crew of people showed up on September 29^th to start building the walls. Things are getting bigger in Leeside Tunnel and more and more people are helping our baby grow. And I think this is a perfect time for us to send praise to the man that started it all Lee Matasi. If only we knew at that time that he wouldn’t be here to see it, maybe things would have been different and not gone the way they did. But without the whole scenario, would we be standing in the same Leeside today? Who knows?

It was 7 sad years ago that Lee Matasi lost his life, over something so unbelievably ignorant, and I personally would like to say thank you to him right now. For this Tunnel that he brought us to because of his passion to paint brought the entire Lower Mainland Skateboard Community together in so many ways and is one of the biggest reasons we are so strong –

 So next time your in the Tunnel below Hastings Street, lift your beer and tip your hat – To Lee!!

[vimeo id=”51447076″ width=”620″ height=”360″]

Next build – October 20th

Well it looks like Baker Skateboards came out with yet another Video, but I’m not quite sure if anyone got to see it in the Premiere since the Police were called in just because of how many people were standing in line out front of the Vine Theatre in L.A. And it somehow turned into a riot. Either way the real question is, why did people start throwing bottles at the Cops anyway, don’t they remember the Rodney King/LAPD incident from the 1990’s. Dude, stay away from that shit.

Way to go Baker – any publicity is good publicity though, right? And this is sure to get a ton of publicity.

Click below for photos and the story by L.A. Weekly

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/10/bake_and_destroy_riot_hollywood_skateboarders_lapd.php

[vimeo id=”51363208″ width=”620″ height=”360″] I just watched Sheldon Barr’s Video of Adam Richter power sliding through the streets of Vancouver just loving those sunny summer days and recognize the fact that Winter is coming fast which means lots of rain in the forecasts. And with rain comes depression for a lot of people, but remember the good times we just had. We finally had a memorable Summer for the first year in quite a few where it was more than 25 degrees outside for multiple days in a row all the time, and even last weekend was incredible, there were people tanning and sunbathing on Thanksgiving Sunday in Southern British Columbia, when’s the last time that happened? But now the weather has finally started to shift the to the opposite, it’s extremely cold at night already and very foggy in the mornings, and the past few days have been fulfilled with pouring rain. But that’s life, that’s where we live, accept it. The funny part is that the past few winters have been filled with streaks of sunny weather with temperatures in the double digits in January and February. The only problem with that is the moisture in the air creates a lot of fog and frost and the ground stays wet all day, and worse – the more sunny days we have in a row in the winter, the colder each one gets. At least when it rains, it warms it up. Accept that Winter is upon us, and enjoy the days we have left before it finally arrives. Accept the rain when it comes and be thankful that it’s not snow. Accept that it’s Winter but know there are still plenty of places to skate in this area during the Winter – Tsawwassen, Ladner, The Dry Spot, Leeside, Chuck Bailey Bowls, the Secret Ramp, and my house. Accept the cold weather, but take advantage of the warm days we receive, and the next time we get a beautiful day, go out with your board and your buddies and just cruise the streets – for what it’s worth, before they’re wet for months…