Words and Photos by Jarrod Pimental
It’s 2008, I’m about to leave work. I’m planning to go skate with my friend, Corey Goonan so I call him up to find out where we’re headed. “We’re right around the corner from you, actually. Come over here.” I grew up on this street in Plymouth, Massachusetts and I know full well there are NO spots on this block. Goonan tells me he’s at the abandoned tennis court nearby and that they made this fun thing to skate. I fully trust his judgment on ‘fun’ so I head right over. Turns out our friend Hodges had gone in, moved all the trash into a corner, and made a ramp. The place had no shortage of shit to work with. It hadn’t even had a net for thirteen years at this point and the only people who went in there were shooting up or getting drunk. Broken bottles, food wrappers, a tire, shoes, broken hockey sticks, shirts, you name it, Hodges piled it all up at one end, a literal 3’ wide 18” high pile of trash, threw a sheet of plywood on top of it all and made it a launch ramp.
Just like that, Plymside was born.
This was well before the DIY movement had hit the suburbs on the East Coast, but Hodges knew he wanted to build stuff here from day one. “We could concrete that pile of trash into a big bump, maybe make a ledge and a flat bar.” All simple beginnings but a necessity to us since our local park was a prefab concrete hell hole and our town had few skate spots. We just wanted somewhere reliable to skate where we weren’t going to get hassled. So that trash pile was the first thing to get concrete.
None of us did any concrete work before, didn’t watch any YouTube videos or anything, so it came out like shit. The stones were all exposed and it wasn’t smooth at all. It took four more layers of concrete before we had something skateable, which worked out because bigger is better anyway.
Word about the spot started to get around. Other locals had been inspired to come and build stuff too and the movement gained momentum. Our friend Ryan Skerry built a 16’ wide, 4’ tall quarter pipe completely solo. He didn’t know a thing about cement at the time, but at least he was watching videos about it. Although he didn’t cut into the ground, he chipped it up by hand with a pick ax. Primitive, but a huge improvement over what we were doing at the time. We didn’t start cutting into the ground until about 2016. Before that we just started the ramp about 2” off the ground and then did a layer of Portland and sand only. In a year or so that would chip up and we would just redo it. The first builds were mixed on the ground, then in a wheelbarrow. I was so sick of hand mixing that I made my own low-budget cement mixer from a washing machine. I welded a bike crank and sprocket onto it so you could hand-spin it with ease. We mixed about 23 bags before the weight finally warped it and it wouldn’t spin anymore. After that, we got a real mixer and started getting pallets of quikcrete delivered from Home Depot.
The peak of our build insanity came when we ordered six yards of concrete from a local cement company to the park on a Saturday morning. Pouring had never been easier! That day we made a quarter pipe, a bank ramp, a long twinkie pump bump, and a solid concrete no-filler knee-high quarter pipe that is now our wall ride. It was a fantastic day. DPW was none too happy when they found out. Rumors went around for a bit that the town planned to shut down the park and destroy it – something they threatened to do in the early stages, too. That little plan got blocked thanks to a petition and the help of our friend Amber Telford. It turns out when a Marine Veteran makes a compelling argument about how disrespectful it was to let the place called, “Veteran’s Memorial Field” go to shit and how grateful she was to see the park cleaned up and used daily, the town is sort of obligated to listen. Minus all the crack filling and maintenance days, we now have 16 different obstacles made over 32 separate pour days. This is all inside a single tennis court too, pretty small.
It’s a modest little DIY but it’s been here for 14 years, which is something to be proud of. Certainly not one of the most insane DIYs ever built, but it is pretty good considering no one here knows what they’re doing. The thing I notice most about Plymside is, it’s a skateboarder’s spot. It may not be Burnside caliber but if you are a street skater, this is one of the most fun DIYs around. PJ Ladd, who has skated here once, was quoted as saying that our bank ramp was one of the best banks he’s ever skated. For a bunch of street skaters from the suburbs of Boston, that is a very proud achievement for us. I also wanted to note that the people in the photos collected here are the main crew at Plymside. The ones who have donated their time and money on nearly every project. This is not everyone sadly, some have moved or we just didn’t have time to shoot any photos. But for the photos featured, these people have put in the time and energy to make this place happen. And they continue to show up and skate there today too.
