Oxford Skateboarding History: Behind the Anchorage Building

In 1986, there was no skateboard park in Oxford. There were no half pipes. No launch ramps yet. We’d only seen those things in magazines.
The pinnacle of skateboarding at the time was this angled concrete surface connected to a sidewalk behind the Anchorage Building. I can see today that it is scuffed up and still used by delinquent youth.
The only other significant, exciting thing we discovered in scouring the community was a half-rotten quarter pipe with a big hole in the middle of it, built by college students near the end of that dead-end street behind the Beacon. Two friends and I, in probably the summer of 1986, skated all the way across town one hot summer Oxford day to check it out. The street has several small bungalows with an old house at the very end. Between the quarter pipe and the old house at the end of the street was a grassy lawn off to the side of the house.
Upon arriving, we saw that one male and one female were sunbathing buck naked on the lawn. The guy sat up to see who had just skated up, then laid back down. They didn’t care.
— Tad Wilkes, tad.wilkes@hottytoddy.com