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Burnside Skatepark is a do-it-yourself concrete skatepark beneath the east end of Portland’s Burnside Bridge that began in the summer of 1990 when local skateboarders illegally poured small concrete features in an empty parking lot. The bridge provided rare covered skating space through the rainy season, and access to leftover cement from nearby road crews allowed the site to expand into a complex landscape of bowls, hips, pyramids, pools, and vertical sections. Later accepted as a public skatepark, it has remained donation-funded and continually evolving. Its transformation of a troubled site helped shape Portland’s skateboarding identity, and its example helped launch the wider DIY skatepark movement.
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Portland, Oregon · United States
