ZT Maximus Skatepark 1995-1996

ZT Maximus. It was dark. It was dirty. It was awesome. It was also the first place I ever had a gun pulled on me (outside: the park was next to a housing project).

In the mid-90s there were very few skateparks, especially in the Northeast. Ratz, an amazing skatepark in Maine, had closed down. Fred Smith’s Skate Hut in Providence, where Kevin Robinson honed his vert skills, had also closed. There was next to nothing left (aside from the small and distant CT Bike Exchange in Connecticut which might even still be there). There was no money in BMX or skateboarding — especially BMX. The Extreme Games had just gotten going, and professional riders were making a few hundred dollars a year. It was awesome.

ZT Maximus in Cambridge, MA was, for a period of several years, the only real indoor skate or BMX option for those of us in New England. While I was going to school in Boston it became a second home during the cold winter months. Don’t get me wrong, it was still cold inside. They barely had money to keep the lights on most of the time, but at least it was dry and free of road salt.

Maximus sat adjacent to a Cambridge housing projects in an old, dirty warehouse building. It was a gnarly neighborhood. That’s how skateparks were, and how they should be — dirty. The skateboarders who ran the place were nice enough to let bikes ride there, I think mostly because they could fill the place on bike nights and pay some of the bills. At some point it started to seem like they were actually cool with us, though. Some of us started riding their pretty regularly, beyond their scheduled “bike nights,” mixed in with the regular skate crew. As far as the local skaters, some big names came up through there like Charlie Wilkins, Robbie Gangemi, Jahmal Williams… even now-iconic street artist Shepard Fairey was a regular in Maximus. In fact, Maximus was one of the first places I saw the now-infamous Andre the Giant has a Posse artwork.

The dynamic at Maximus was amazing. The owner was a tattoo artist. Tattoo shops were illegal at the time in Massachusetts, but there were often tattoos going down in the back room behind the shop. His dog had a tattoo and drank beer off the floor. When it was closing time they turned the lights off with no warning. Normally at a skatepark someone working will warn everyone, and clear the park of all people before shutting off the lights… Something about safety. At Maximus, when it was closing time, they flipped the lights off. Inevitably you’d hear “FUUUUUCCCKKK” as someone dropped out of the sky in complete darkness over on the vert ramp. I suspect if someone had died in the process they would have just tossed them out back and kept about their business. Again, the place was awesome.

Now about that there vert ramp at Maximus. They had one, sort of. It was a large halfpipe, and it was super fun, but it didn’t really go to vert. The ceiling rafters were about 6 feet above the deck. On a skateboard you were fine for lip tricks and relatively low airs, but on a bike, if you went more than a couple feet high you were slamming into the rafters. That was part of the charm at Maximus. Some things were sketchy, but it was an awesome kind of sketchy. It was also all we had.

Maximus is where I started to get more into photography, and specifically BMX Photography. I’d played with it over the years, but I got more into it during the time I rode Maximus regularly. Looking back, it was probably one of the best places to learn how to take pictures, because it was an absolute nightmare of a shooting situation. It was dark. Really dark. Shooting action is pretty tricky to begin with in mixed indoor lighting conditions, but trying to learn how to use flashes, with film, in that kind of horrible lighting was a bit of a clusterfuck. I had a lot of black frames on that old film. Underexposed, blown out… I did a lot of experimenting, though, and looking back, I actually really like the rawness of some of these photos. Harsh lighting, blur, dust, scratches. It’s a dirty skatepark, and I feel like crisp tack sharp photos wouldn’t necessarily do that period justice.

We had a good crew of regulars in there: Sean Rudzinsky, Weasel, Burger, Jerry Bagley, Dave Muggleston, John Maul, Mark Rainha, Tony Long, Keith McElhinney, Mike Rotondo, Tom Masterson, Allan Farris, Kevin Robinson… some of those guys are still around the BMX world to this day. Some of them went on to pretty good “careers” as pro riders. We all have the guys from Maximus to thank for getting us through at least a few winters when we had no other place to ride.

These photos were shot roughly 1995-1996 with a Nikon 6006 and a Konica TC-X.

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