For quite some time I wanted to start building a quickcrete-type ghetto spot somewhere. After two unsuccessful attempts, a couple years had passed by when one day I noticed a photo from a local skater’s Facebook, I realized I knew where that spot was so I decided to go check it out. The abandoned location was only 10 minutes from my house and had been right under my nose all along. When I got the location I saw right off the bat that it would be ideal to start building. It was an abandoned site on property owned by the local steel mill. The remains of old buildings laid in piles, several consisting of perfectly good cinder blocks. To my surprise, there were already several ride-able obstacles left over from the mill buildings. I knew right away I wanted to build a quarter because there was a perfect spot to have a quarter with a subbox. During our first visit to “The Spot” there was already snow on the ground and I knew it would be difficult to work with the quickcrete so we waited a few months to get started.

Once we started having some 35+ degree days we began to build. We went to a nearby skatepark and traced the tranny of one of the quarters onto a sheet of composite plywood that I had. I took this home and cut out the 2 transitions that would become the sides of the quarter. The next step were to buy quickcrete and take everything to the spot. At the time I had a rental van so I didn’t give a fuck what I put inside it. We also stole a shopping cart to push materials around in, mostly moving cinder blocks. We set up the two wooden transitions in place and began to lay the cinder blocks. We filled the cinder blocks with stones and gravel and every couple of layers we’d put down some quickcrete to hold everything together. Once we had all the cinder blocks laid we went back and put down red bricks to dial in the tranny. After that we put dirt on top of everything to get an even smoother transition. The next step was to lay down some chainlink fence that would later hold the top layer of cement in place. Luckily we found all the cinder blocks, red bricks, fencing, and dirt all at The Spot. Finally our last step was to put down the layer of quickcrete that we would ride on. All of this was trial-and-error for us because we had never built a quarter before and had little experience with quickcrete. During this process we were also battling rain and cold conditions that were holding up building.

When the quarter was finally ride-able we were psyched! It wasn’t the smoothest quarter in the world but it was fun and worked perfectly with the subbox behind. It’s awesome to have a local DIY spot that everyone can go and hang out at and not worry about having to get busted. I’d like to say thanks to Slade and Shilo Staniech, Mike Cesario, Miles Houser, and anyone else that helped make this possible!