Words and photos by Mark White
“August in Kansas City is hotter than two rats in a fucking wool sock.” This is what Ichiro Suzuki, the Japanese-born and soon-to-be Hall of Fame baseball player, said when asked for his favorite American expression. It’s true, and it is especially punishing when you’re on a skateboard all day, sandwiched between direct sunlight and the concrete absorbing it.
Meanwhile, the city has been trying to curtail street racing and sideshows. The West Bottoms, a historically industrial area, is a well-known spot for these. In May, one of the homies noticed a subtle change in this neighborhood: A sprawling brick parking lot underneath a highway overpass had been fitted with dozens of massive parking blocks, preventing drivers from doing burnouts and donuts. You can still see smooth arcs of burnt rubber on the ground, disconnected only by the concrete blocks that now sit atop them. Eight feet long, seven inches high, and just over a foot wide. What does a skateboarder do when noticing this? Get to work with the clear coat and wax. And so began the “Webo bridge spot” (shortened from West Bottoms).
It started with one parking block and a few slappy sessions. The word slowly spread. Someone stacked two parking blocks to make a ledge. A second ledge of the same height appeared not long after. A curb that borders the northeast corner of the lot was rub-bricked, lacquered, and waxed (about 120 feet of skateable curb in total). A cinder block was placed underneath one end of a parking block for an incline. People bring their street sign kickers to air over parking blocks or to set up wallrides.
It’s only the start: People are continuing to find new ways to skate the spot. It’s become our default meetup spot, supplanting our entirely unshaded usual local. The wind tunnel underneath bridges creates a breeze, too—but not a strong enough wind to be an annoyance for skating. It is also an incredibly wide overpass—six lanes, a median, and a shoulder on each side—meaning it stays dry even during the raining sideways summer storms. The brick is smooth, and the space between bricks isn’t too wide. All that fits in these crevices are pigeon feathers, bottle caps, and shell casings left over from whatever sketchy shit was happening at 3 a.m. the night before.
From a few homies doing slappy grinds and boardslides on one waxed parking block, I’ve now seen two dozen or more people skating there at a time on nice weekend days, ripping the various sections of the spot. Clips from the spot fill Instagram stories of local skaters. People sit on unwaxed curbs or camping chairs to chill and laugh after hours of skating.
Skateboarders appreciate aspects of the urban, built environment that most people don’t think twice about. That’s a virtue— to be able to find community and peace underneath a highway overpass, to get hours of joy from some concrete boxes the city placed to keep cars from going full Tokyo Drift. Huck, a local legend, suggested I title this piece, “Webo Beach”; he said that, if you lay back and close your eyes, the passing cars overhead sound like ocean waves crashing.
