Pink Panther skatepark

I found this Pigmy Skates page with some nice photos from the abandoned (and now destroyed) Pink Panther skatepark outside of Slidell. The Pink Panther was a 1970's era concrete skatepark located off of I-12 at the Pink Panther trailer park. I was lucky enough to go skate it once with Mike Smiley in the mid 90's. It was abandoned then, and we eventually got chased off by a sheriff. It has since been bulldozed. Anyway, it featured lots of banks, a snakerun that emptied into a bowl (that was full of water), a snakerun with a huge transitional wall, and some volcano / hip type things. Check out the Pigmy Skates page for a lot more photos of the park.



Here are a few shots of Mr. Smiling Michael at the Pink Panther. Hopefully, someday photos of the park when it was actually open in the 70's will surface.




Pigmy Skates also has a page on Houma's Paisley Fart Ditch, which was apparently the equivalent of Lafayette's Greenbriar Ditch. That is, a ditch that was fairly lame, but since it was the only one around, everyone still went there to skate it all the time.



I remember when we used to skate that little stupid Hub City Ford ditch or that one in between the two sides of the Thruway... then I took a roadtrip out to Albuquerque and skated the ditches out there. They were like works of art, perfectly transitional, hips, spines, roll-ins, you name it. Lafayette ditches were never the same again. Speaking of Greenbriar, here's a photo that I got from Beth Blackburn of Jerry Guillory standing in the middle of Greenbriar Ditch.



Also, here's one of somebody skating the Catfish Banks in Baton Rouge that I found somewhere. Damn, I miss that place.