Last night I dug out a bunch of old photos from Impact Skatepark in Rhode Island to scan for a more elaborate post down the road. Located in East Providence, Impact was Kevin Robinson’s skatepark in the late 90s. I spent a ton of time there before I moved to California. It was a dark, dungeon-like place for photos, but the tricky lighting actually made it a great place to learn. If you could get a decent photo at Impact, you could do so just about anywhere. The park saved us east-coaster from the winter, and saw riders come in from all over. Derrick Girard, who later became known as “the Maine-iac” and joined the illustrious FBM team, was a regular, despite living three hours away in Maine. He’d show up on a race rame (I believe that’s a Reynolds Racing frame in the photo) and destroy the box jump and wooden doubles (which you can see in the background).

I’ve got some scanning to do, but I’ll be posting some more photos from Impact in the near future, including some shots of Ryan “Biz” Jordan, Jerry Bagley, Keith McElhinney, and Kevin Robinson.

Brian Chapman has been a fixture in the New England Bicycle scene for decades. Since the ’80s Brian has been one of the more well known flatland freestyle riders in the Northeast, and while many of the riders from his generation have faded into obscurity, Brian continues to progress. These photos were shot back in 2005 in a parking garage in downtown Providence, RI. The shot above never got used. The kickflip hitchhiker after the jump is very similar to a film version that ran in Ride, and the cross-footed halfpacker ran in Sophisticated Rider as a center-spread.

The Chapman Brother’s legacy in BMX run deep. In the 80s Brian’s older brother Kieran produced a well known ‘zine called Radazine, which eventually became Wire Zine. A long string of videos covering the Northeast BMX scene evolved into one of the first BMX websites, and one of the first BMX sites with dedicated web content, eWire. These days Brian runs a hand-built custom bicycle frame company out of Providence called Circle A.

I dug out some folders of some old BMX slides from when I still lived in New England. Most of the stuff was shot during the late 1990s. I’ve got a lot of stuff from Kevin Robinson’s old skatepark, Impact which was in Providence, and I’ll post that in the near future. But this stuff of Jason Enns is what I was looking for in the digging process. I remembered we’d shot some stuff at Impact for the second issue of Nine-ninety Magazine (which was never published), and I was curious if it had disappeared. Sure enough, it was sitting unused in an Impact Skatepark folder in my slide archives. Jason had some of the most original mini-ramp style tricks at the time, and we had shot an X-up Canadian nosepick on the six foot quarterpipe, which really stuck out in my mind. 12 years later it’s still a bad ass trick. I was really hoping I still had this negative, and sure enough I did (In those days I didn’t really file stuff away properly). Check it out after the jump. Pusher sticker on his helmet, Iron Maiden patches on his ProDesign elbow pads. Kink Revision B frame. That bike is probably about 45 pounds.