Scott Lembach, manager of Muir Surf & Skate, is stoked. It’s a primo SoCal day in July, and a handful of groms from Ramona are milling around the popular skate shop on the UC San Diego campus in La Jolla, which is about 30 miles from their hometown. Lembach is talking to two of them.

In June of 1961, East German leader Walter Ulbricht set things in motion for the
creation of the Berlin Wall. On August 9th of that same year the Wall was erected
and it became the most famous symbol of the Cold War. For someone of my generation
(born in 1964) it was inconceivable that the Berlin Wall could ever be torn
down. But in November of 1989, the wall actually did come down. The history of the
Berlin Wall is both fascinating and tragic. I am publishing this photo because I want
to clearly illustrate what happens when walls do in fact come tumbling down.

The global public skatepark movement planted its flag on the shores of a new land on October 30, 2007 when Galit Skatepark opened in Tel Aviv, Israel. Galit is the largest skatepark in the Middle East, covering 28,000 square feet. For the past 25 years Israeli skaters have been subsisting on plywood construction, pay-to-skate parks in various states of disrepair, a few private ramps and choice street spots that were quickly sessioned until the arrival of the rent-a-cops. Despite its hot, dry climate, Israel has very few swimming pools per capita, and every one we’ve spotted had squared walls with a square bottom. Ah, yes, there was one miserable attempt to create a mellow bowled skate spot in a Jerusalem park years back. Unfortunately, the local contractor mistranslated the phrase “smooth concrete surface” into “slipperyas- ice surface,” and hence, Sacker Park earned its nickname “Sucker Park.

Green is a hot topic these days. Green stands for the environment and money. While we are proud to publish what will be the first of many stories relating to the environment, we fully realize this is a difficult, multi-layered topic that hits a number of hot buttons. Like most of you, we don’t find it that easy to navigate this “sea of green.” For some reason, however, we are compelled to keep hitting the buttons other magazines refuse to touch.