ALVA SKATES

*

ALVA SKATES *

Venice, California

Founded 1977

____________________

15 skateboards currently on view

Overview

Founded by Tony Alva in 1977, Alva Skates was among the earliest successful skateboard companies owned and directed by a professional skateboarder. Emerging from the surf-influenced pool culture of Venice and Dogtown, Alva placed the personality of its riders at the center of the company.

By the mid-to-late 1980s, Alva had developed a particularly unruly looking identity. Pronounced concaves, distinctive shapes, experimental stains and splattered finishes gave its decks a less standardized appearance than many of the era’s larger manufacturers. Riders including Bill Danforth, Fred Smith, Jef Hartsel, Craig Johnson and others reinforced a team image in which punk style, individual expression and aggressive skateboarding seemed inseparable.

Alva helped establish the skateboard company as more than a manufacturer. It could represent a tribe, an attitude and an entirely different way of living.

I grew up where the outskirts of metropolitan Detroit gave way to farmland. We had dirt roads, country music, cars and group sports. Skateboarding reached me only in glimpses: a homemade BMX track with a wooden quarter pipe form in an empty field, little plastic boards in a trailer park, or a real California skateboard brought home by somebody whose father had traveled out west for work.
My first real deck was a Santa Cruz Special Edition that I call the Mechanical Fish. My second was a 1987 Alva Bill Danforth Circle of Skulls, bought at Town & Country Bike Shop in Northville. Danforth was from Michigan. That mattered. Whenever I visited Lansing and Modern Skate, I carried the possibility that I might actually see him. I seem to remember seeing a photograph of him skating there in a magazine. This made the people on the decks and in Thrasher no longer seem to belong entirely to California.
That Danforth deck looked and felt unlike anything I had owned. Mine had a red-and-black split stain, an unusually deep concave with a tri-tail whose corners seemed to rise into a V. Compared with the nearly flat boards I had started on, it felt almost ridiculous—and completely exciting. I never thought the wood was as strong as the Santa Cruz or Powell Peralta decks around me because mine chipped badly, developed a substantial split along the side and eventually delaminated and split apart. But I never forgot what it felt like to stand on it.
The Circle of Skulls graphic didn’t stay on my skateboard. I drew it on my school folders beside AC/DC and Metallica logos and carried it through junior high. Skateboard graphics didn’t change as constantly then. The strongest ones stayed with you. They haunted your memory for years.
To me, Alva represented creative freedom: proof that you didn’t have to be a football player, a farmer or a kid who worked on cars. You could dress differently, be creative, invent yourself and find your own tribe. Alva made another way of being visible.