Welcome to Dogtown

Near the Santa Monica and Venice areas in the 70’s a team of surfers later switching to skateboarding known as the Z-Boys emerged. The crew would ride the waves and hang out at a spot called Dogtown in Pacific Ocean Park. While spending time at the Zephyr shop, the local surf shop where they got their name from, by skating more and more every day they soon realized that it eventually became as equally important as surfing for them. That’s when one of the owners of the 'Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions' , Skip Engblom, decided to set up a skate team that would end up being 12-member strong. Among the team’s members where skateboard legends Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta. By incorporating their surf moves while riding the concrete, the way the Z-Boys skated came real close to the way they surfed. The Z-Boys first gained their status at a competition held in 1975 where they left pretty much everyone with their mouths wide open introducing a new style of freestyle skateboarding that included surf moves and had a much more aggressive tone to it. Consequently this new style took America by storm and in the years that followed everyone was skating like the Z-Boys were. The crew is also responsible for the birth of what is known as vert when they started to raid the streets of their hometown breaking into houses looking for empty swimming pools which they could skate in. It was in one of these pools when Tony Alva completed the first aerial in skateboarding history. It is pretty fair to say that all tricks in most of today’s extreme sports, whether on water or land that take place above the ground have originated from that trick. Nonetheless the money they were offered by other companies and the attention the team were starting to get would eventually tear them apart since Ho and Engblom’s budget was not big enough to keep them all under the Zephyr Productions roof. Eventually all of them parted ways and did their own thing with Alva and Peralta becoming two of the biggest names that skateboarding has ever witnessed reaching up to cult status, while Ho revived the Zephyr Shop in Hawaii after being closed down at the end of 1976. Peralta also wrote the script for the 2005 movie called “Lords of Dogtown” breaking down the story of the Dogtown crew and features some of the original Z-Boys in minor roles