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Reader Contribution Page The Falls Ramp South Miami The following text and pictures were sent into us by Dave Jasper. This was his backyard ramp and the story of it. Thanks for sending it in! When you’re a ramp-owner, you don’t need a car. The world comes to you. Despite all the great things about having a ramp -- like being able to walk out the door and drop in to a 28-foot-wide, 11 and a half foot tall halfpipe whenever I got the urge, and the illicit thrill of stealing mountains of plywood and 2x4s from construction sites (not to mention coping liberated from behind Builder’s Square in my Dodge Dart, 10-foot lengths of steel pipe slid through the open windows and jutting out like mailbox destroying wings). Despite all of that, the best thing about it was all the people I met. From the locals to the different crews from places like Palm Beach and Fort Pierce, to the handful of pros that ventured all the way to the tip of South Florida. And from 1984 to 1988, my ramp, the Falls Ramp, was probably the Southernmost ramp in the state, situated as it was in South Miami, sort of between Kendall and Perrine. When people ask me why I didn’t even get a driver’s license, much less a car, till I was 18, I told them I didn’t need to go anywhere. The ramp was at my house. It wasn’t every 17 year-old kid who had the likes of Monty Nolder and Lester Kasai skate their ramp. Not to mention Thomas Taylor, Buck Smith and our resident sponsored-guy Robbie Weir. And some of those people are still my friends. (Click on the thumbnail pictures to enlarge.)
The first incarnation of the Falls Ramp was a 12-foot-wide ramp gleaned from the pages of Thrasher. It’s too bad we didn’t build it to scale. It has probably a three-foot transition and a foot of vert, much of the wood stolen on foot using, of all things, a shopping cart. But I learned to drop in on that bone-jarring little ramp along with Danny Pawlak, the Falls Ramp’s first local and a huge influence on my life. When it became obvious that it was time to upgrade, Danny and I began stealing lumber from this one house that was near completion in “the weeds,” which is what we called the area a few blocks away that took years to complete. Streets were put in, and some kind of irritating sawgrass shot up in the vacant lots. One time I turned down one of those streets and saw a fox scurry off into the brush. It turned out the pressure-treated 4x4s we were grabbing were intended for a fence. I know this only because my dad told me. In a very cool move that he would come to regret once he realized stealing wood would become a necessity, a habit begat by the need for bigger and better ramps. This one time, he backed his 1972, 3-on-a-tree Ford pickup truck down this junk-strewn, polluted side-street and Danny and I loaded it up.
I’m not proud of how much wood we stole. It is something that to this day, I deeply, deeply regret. Just kidding. I’m very proud of it. It was our only resource. We couldn’t get jobs; we were too busy skating. We built and 9-foot-high, one-foot-of-vert, 8-foot-wide halfpipe crossing the old ramp, so it had 12-feet-of-flat-bottom. Stupidly, we used Woodlife Wood Preservative. The word “gunk” seems fitting here; the ramp got gunked up, as did our wheels. We’d do power slides out in the rough asphalt street to clean our wheels, much like scraping your shoe on the asphalt to clean off dog crap. That rickety construct brought out the old school 70s guys who were left without terrain when the dozers felled Runway Skatepark in Perrine a couple of years prior. One of those nomadic locals was Robbie Weir, who had once been on Powell-Peralta before a knee injury landed him on Walker. His clout with our camp was instantaneous. He convinced us we needed a bigger ramp. As if we needed convincing. How good was Robbie? My dad called him “The King.” Of course, that’s from a man who once tucked a towel into his shirt collar to resemble a cape, donned some pads, a helmet and sunglasses, grabbed an extra board and climbed to the top of the ramp during a full-on session, posed at the top like he was gonna drop in, with the wrong foot on the tail. The first sizeable Falls Ramp was done by fall of 1984, when I started 11th grade. Guys from Cambodia started coming down – Paul Schneider being just one I remember – and North Miami’s Dean Lucas, eventually sponsored by Sims. Back then he was just a rail-thin, longhaired skate prodigy.
Sometime in 1985 we tacked on eight more feet of width, bringing it to a grand total of 24-feet-wide. The coping sucked on that ramp. It had angle-iron, cut-PVC and eventually 2x6s with beveled edges. They weren’t even long boards; you’d snag doing 50-50s without copers, which by that time were becoming passe. Finally, in 1986, our ramp seemed dated. Big transitions were the thing. Cambodia had been rebuilt in a cow pasture, 40-feet-wide, with 9-foot-transitions. The North Miami Ramp likewise had large transitions. We all met up one night at Josh Smith’s house a couple of blocks away. We deliberated and debated. It took some cajoling to convince me not to just whack off some vert and relayer the ramp. I was afraid the ramp would get torn down, but we wouldn’t get our act together to rebuild. I’d be left rampless at age 18. A terrible prospect. My fears were unfounded. We tore down one Falls Ramp in three days and built in just 10 more days the final ramp, with giant transitions like a missile silo (all right, they were just 9 and 3/4s). It was like a barn-raising, a dozen of us working all day and “shopping” for lumber come evening. Hell, even some non-skaters picked up a hammer and learned to use a circular saw. It would last two years. It would survive a neighbor’s complaints that brought a building inspector around and forced us to actually cut down a pine tree and literally move the ramp about 12-feet. Suddenly, none of the guys were around to help. But a few of us got it done.
When I was 20, though, I decided I’d had enough. The things I’d liked about it in the beginning were driving me crazy. Namely, the people. Most of my original friends, Jeff London, Brent Wilson, Danny Pawlak, had already “moved on,” and there were a lot of jock skaters showing up in Saabs. If I didn’t feel like skating one day, I’d be asked if I was quitting, my life being what it was under a microscope. That solid ramp, urethane, plywood, steel pipe coping, the squeegee rigged with a nail to keep it attached to the handle. I can smell it, that hot wood smell, sort of pines, but like baking under that tropical sun. Pine needles. It was our own version of Minor Threat's Dischord House, you know, a center, a hangout for our group of friends. It was never someone's living room for us. It was those decks, with the 2x10 benches, and the Falls Mini-Shit ramp, under the big ficus tree. A lot of the tropical foliage was uprooted when Hurricane Andrew barged through. I walked through the once beautiful yard and found wood and tar paper and nails from people’s homes wrecked by the hurricane, bringing back to mind the days a few years earlier when I began tearing the ramp down, severing the chord that kept me from going away to school until I was 21.
Thanks for the memories to all the guys who frequented the various Falls Ramps – I wouldn’t be who I am if I hadn’t met you people: John Bailly, Howard Montaque, Shaun Arold, Brent Wilson, Chris Griffiths, Dean Lucas, Robbie Weir, Jeff London, Danny Pawlak, the Quit boys – Andre Serafini, Russell Mofsky (sorry I missed your wedding, Russ) and Addy “Aldsworth” Burns – Dave Jacobo, the Van Wambecks, David Lee Russell, Ed Shred Acevedo, “Cocaine” Wayne, Al Gibson, Scott from New Jersey, Chris and Dodger Bridges, and Mr. Robbie “The King” Weir.
Most of all, thanks and much gratitude goes to my dad, wrong foot forward or not, for putting up with the financially risky ramp in litigious Miami because your son and his friends needed somewhere to skate. Had someone gotten hurt, you could have been sued, dude! You took the chance and we all won.
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