pavedwave longboarding

ZapZang · Joined: 17 Sep 2008 Posts: 32

What an excellent way to celebrate yesterday's holiday - the weather here was cold, sleeting, with 30 mph winds.

Perfect weather for Skateville!

- a vacant building I found a way to sneak into, with at least half a million square feet of perfectly smooth floors, spread across the multiple floors or 4 interconnected buildings - all with either smooth poured cement or old hardwood floors. All transitions between sections, hallways, etc are smooth - apparently it was important to allow rolling carts to get anywhere in the site, in the building's former life.

The whole place is almost totally empty, power still on, cleaned and swept, some lights on in every area, a nice forklift and scissorlift to play with in a giant hanger-like room ... we arrived around 6:00 and left after midnight, brought brews, smoke, munchies, cake, pizza, an iboom for tunes ... it was pretty much heaven.

I'll try to post some pics or maybe a vid later ...

pavedwave · Joined: 22 Oct 2007 Posts: 1120 Location: seattle wa usa

I suppose asking for pictures would be a wee bit incriminating? Wink

Now you've got me thinking about the old military aircraft hangars at Magnuson park again... would be perfect for a rainy day.

Truly puzzles me why the city can't agree to some low-cost, low-risk way to open places like this up for public use and encourage kids to get off their Nintendo-sitting couch shaped butts and do something active, when we have this kind of resource just sitting around literally collecting dust. Last time I checked it would take over $1000 to "rent" one of these places and that's before insurance.

ZapZang · Joined: 17 Sep 2008 Posts: 32

Yeah, we were trying to figure out a way to do the exact same thing - it would seem like it would be a win-win for the building owner, vs letting it slowly succumb to the vandals and such that will inevitably come after it sits vacant for long enough., but yeah - with insurance and such it's just hard to see how it would be feasible.

I uploaded the pics over lunch, sadly not many of them capture the sheer scale of this place - every skatable area is usually connected to at least one or two other major areas on the same floor, and the basements are all interconnected and incredibly vast ... next time we go back I'll maybe try some long exposure shots, and I tried taking a few videos that might be more successful, havent uploaded any of those yet though.

these are rather sucky but give some idea perhaps:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3608/3463441872_8e86f93ce3_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3550/3462627987_69be3e01f0_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3127/3463417310_f1842d0afe_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3542/3463405850_bc18c97a58_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3477/3463415792_4c09c6df34_b.jpg