I hate to learn about cool stuff after it's gone.

Interesting bit of local news, I always thought it was odd that there were so many people riding skateboards near my office. A fashion byproduct of the posh area, I thought, or maybe they were trying to take advantage of a rare smooth sidewalk. There are very, very few skateable surfaces here, and nothing resembling a skate park.

Then I heard news that there was a secret (illegal) skate park hidden nearby! Apparently some skaters found some unused land being used as an illegal dump site, cleared it out, and built a squatter-skate-park that operated for 7 years undetected. Yesterday the government found it and used bulldozers to turn it back into a dump site.

I would've been tempted to fix up my old board and have a try if I'd known...so maybe it's better that I didn't know after all

Kids being industrious and inventive? Berks that. Illegal dump sites are better, right?

Dude, that's how burnside skatepark came to be. The locals would dump bags of quick Crete and form it. It was a rough neighborhood. No posers allowed. We did this in my town too. We actually "extended" the grade school blacktop with quickcrete bags and smoothed it as any 16yr olds would be capable of. Over the course of a few summers we added like 50ft of concrete. They never removed, it but the faculty would ask us to not do it. We just added it later that night.