CARLSBAD -- A group of people fighting to save the former Carlsbad Raceway from a future as a business park has a new ally: skateboarders. In addition to being the home of one of the region's last quarter-mile drag strips, the 146-acre parcel near Palomar Airport Road contains what is widely considered to be the nation's first skate park.
After hearing that drag-strip racers were trying to prevent the raceway from being bulldozed, several skateboarders began a campaign this week to save the old skate park, which has been mostly covered by mounds of dirt for two decades.
"What we envision for the property is restoring the original park and building some modern things," said David Bergthold, a 40-year-old Oceanside skateboarding enthusiast who is leading the effort.
The skateboarders would like to buy about six acres from business park developer H.G. Fenton Co. and add a museum, Bergthold said Friday. They're planning to host a rally near the property and give a presentation Tuesday to the City Council, he added.
Bergthold said he knows it won't be an easy battle, especially since they have just begun their fund-raising efforts.
Allen Jones, a vice president for H.G. Fenton Co., repeated Friday what he has said to the drag-strip racers: The property isn't for sale and his company isn't changing its plans to start grading in November. Work on several roads on the site is already occurring.
City officials have said the issue is out of their hands -- the developer already has the initial permits to start construction on the site.
Bergthold said his group has hope because they only want part of the property. There's also the historic significance to consider, he added.
Reached by telephone from his home in New Jersey, the skate park's designer said Bergthold has a point.
"I think they have the opportunity to claim their place as the epicenter of skateboarding -- they have a lot to be proud of," John O'Malley said as he recalled how the facility came to be.
O'Malley said he was a 19-year-old skateboarding champion when his neighbor in Leucadia, 40-something contractor Jack Graham, asked him to become a partner in the project. O'Malley did the designs, crafting a concrete collection of curving shapes that looked like the moguls in a skiing course. The park, the first of many they created together, opened in March 1976.
Technically, a place in Florida with a few rough ramps and a concrete hill could be declared the America's first skateboarding facility since it opened a week before the one in Carlsbad, said Michael Brooke, editor and publisher of the Toronto-based Concrete Wave magazine as well as a new book on the history of skateboarding.
But, he added, nobody really counts the Florida location because it wasn't designed by skateboarders.
"In the grand scheme of things, Carlsbad was America's first skate park," he said. "It really was the pre-emptive park. … You can really make a case that this put Southern California on the map."
Aaron Astorga, a skateboarder who works for a travel gear company in Vista, can recall going to the park the year it opened.
To a 6-year-old boy it was unbelievable, he said.
"It was massive," Astorga said. "You would ride up and down over the moguls. … The park was overwhelming."
It's one of many ties the area has to the skateboarding industry, O'Malley said.
"(In Leucadia), I lived a bike ride away from the guy who invented the urethane wheel, the guy that invented the wide truck (a wheel turning mechanism), the guy that invented the first flexible skateboards, and the editor of Skateboarding magazine," he said, later adding, "The city of Carlsbad has a rich history of skateboarding."
Contact staff write Barbara Henry at (760) 901-4072 or bhenry@nctimes.com.
