At the Simi Valley Town Center in Ventura County you’ll find a place that is helping to preserve and celebrate the history of a sport that is believed to have been created here in California.
The Skateboarding Hall of Fame and Museum is a 10,000 square foot facility that includes the museum, a skate shop and skate park and is the passion project of founder Todd Huber.
Todd is a life-long skateboarder who started collecting boards in the late 80s after getting hypnotized to quit smoking. Part of that process involved thinking about what he’d spend the money he’d save from not smoking on and he decided on collecting skateboards.
He started by going to the local swap meet and chatting up the vendors; eventually they’d started searching for and holding boards for him. Afterwards, he took out an ad in a toy collector newspaper and had pickers calling him from around the country with boards they’d find.
After a few years, he had a garage full of skateboards, but he’d always envisioned a place where he could hang out with his friends and show off his collection. After a visit to the Petersen Automotive, he came up with the idea for a skateboard museum and one of his friend’s helped him get that started in 1997.
The idea for the Hall of Fame came after he learned about the Water Ski Hall of Fame in Florida and thought that skateboarding deserved a place to celebrate its greats too. This was made more pertinent when he found out that one of his childhood heroes, Bruce Logan was down and out. Todd felt that there needed to be a place to lift these pioneers and legends of skateboarding up and give them their rightful due, and in 2009 the first class was inducted, which included Tony Hawk, Danny Way, Tony Alva, and of course, Bruce Logan.
At the museum, You can see portraits of the hall of fame inductees hung from the ceiling. You can also see the evolution of skateboards from their humble beginnings in the 1950s in what Todd calls the folk art section; where all the boards are homemade from planks of wood and roller-skates or from old scooters to the first commercially available sidewalk surfboards of the 60s, Into the 70s where boards started to have kick tails and grip tape, through to the wider and more colorful boards of the 80s, and into the 90s where the modern design of boards that we’re all used to was solidified.
The museum also includes a library with a vast collection of skateboarding books, magazines and VHS tapes.
If you bring your own board, you can pay a small fee to skate the museum’s skatepark or you can purchase a board from the Musuem’s skate shop and you can even take lessons.
If you’re more interested in owning a board that has been ridden by a pro, the Museum is currently working on an NFT project that will give you the opportunity to own the actual physical autographed board from Pros like Steve Olson, Tony Hawk, Natas Kaupas and many more. This will help the museum, which is a registered non-profit, to upgrade their skatepark, acquire and preserve more rad artifacts, and to continue to celebrate the pioneers of skateboarding and inspire the next generation.
References:
Interview with Todd Huber, President of the Skateboarding Hall of Fame, Sept. 24, 2022