In the same way that skateboard style has influenced clothing and graphics, the new parks have begun to grab the attention of designers in other fields. Architect David Rockwell, designer of the Nobu restaurants in Manhattan and the set of the musical Hairspray, says skate parks, with their use of "the continuous ramp that leads you through a series of adventures," were an inspiration for a new playground he's working on. Joe Ragsdale, who teaches landscape architecture at California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo, says that every year his students come up with different ways to provide ideal flight paths for intrepid skaters. "Skate parks have come of age," he says.

Skateboarding has been around since the late 1950s, when California surfers began attaching wheels to short boards so that they could retrieve on dry land just a bit of the feeling they got from a wave. In no time it had evolved into an acrobatic art form that derived, like ballet, from the eternal human impulse to part the air with style. Skate parks, which first appeared in the 1970s, started out as places meant to draw skaters away from the respectable concrete of downtown. But those early parks tended to be melancholy stretches of concrete with a few bowls and half pipes--that's a semicircular ramp--thrown in. The merest parking lot was more fun. Over the next decade many of the parks closed, victims of underuse and high insurance costs.