Story and Photos By Nate Brooks
i was sitting at the counter of Atomic Tattoos studio 1 in Largo Florida. slow day. cruising myspace. i see a flyer for an Emerica “Wild in the streets” event. the thought crossed my mind to send Rob Meronek (the staff Photographer and web Czar from Skate Park of Tampa.) a message suggesting that the crew at SPoT do one of these geurilla style street contests for the coming GSD. he said “thats a sick idea but we are going to be out of town for another contest. we wont be able to do it.
before i mopped the shop and turned off the neon open sign. a flyer for a streetstyle contest was on the home page of skateparkoftampa.com.
June twenty first, two thousand six. The summer solstice. The longest, brightest day of the year, though nobody gives a damn about astronomical semantics when the humidity is hovering at a suffocating ninety percent and the asphalt is melting beneath four wheels. This was Go Skateboarding Day in its raw, unpasteurized infancy—before it became a corporate-sanctioned Hallmark holiday with sanitized park events and safety waivers. This was a direct, unfiltered manifestation of Total Carnage.
Around two hundred of us congregated at the historic Bro Bowl in downtown Tampa. If you know anything about the soul of this thing, you know the Bro Bowl isn’t just concrete; it’s an altar of chipped paint and decades of sacrificial skin.
The session was a blistering, beautiful collision of styles. You had John Montesi, Ian Gow, and Mike Goodwine and countless other Tampa Locals, ripping the bowl apart, carving lines through the heat haze like it was nothing, ignoring the grit and the blistering sun. It was jazz. It was noise. Written in urethane lines on weathered transitional concrete.
But the bowl couldn’t hold that much manic energy for long. The crowd had swollen to two hundred and fifty kids, degenerates, and lifers. We rallied. We didn’t ask for a permit; we just took the space. A rolling, clattering swarm of pure defiance, we surged right into the teeth of downtown Tampa traffic. Drivers were honking, engines were revving, but we were a singular, unstoppable entity. It wasn’t a parade—it was a full-blown street protest, a rolling riot of sorts.
Our destination? The amphitheater stairs at the downtown art museum.
We arrived like a guerrilla army occupying a public square. No banners, just boards. A spot-checking best trick contest kicked off immediately on the museum’s concrete structures. Dylan Perry—the legend DMFP—was throwing his life on the line alongside a handful of fearless unknowns. Then Mike Espinoza stepped up, cutting through the noise to shut the whole session down with one of his trademark, picture-perfect frontside flips. Pure, clean, architectural destruction.
Then came the comedy.
A lone security guard emerged from the museum doors, puffed up with institutional authority. He had that rigid, clipboard walk—the look of a man who genuinely believed he was about to lecture three teenagers about “private property.” Instead, he rounded the corner and was met by a sweating, shouting wall of hundreds of skaters. You could see the exact microsecond his brain short-circuited. He didn’t say a word. He just turned right back around and retreated inside to call the police.
The alarm was raised, and the herd split. We didn’t disperse; we just relocated the roller riot. We skated illegally through the streets again, pushing hard across town to a secluded concrete sanctuary known as Turtle Ditch.
But the peace didn’t last. The sirens caught up. It wasn’t a gentle “move along,” either. The cops swarmed the ditch, and the blue lights sent kids scattering like roaches into the brush. In the middle of the frantic scramble, the heavy hitters got cornered. I watched through my viewfinder as Matt Welch, Rob Meronek, and Ryan Clements were wrangled by the police.
*Click.*
I snapped the final photo of the afternoon—the three of them being put into cuffs, a perfect, tragic monument to a day that crossed the line from a holiday into a rap sheet.
Right as the cuffs clicked, my own luck ran short. I broke for the perimeter, took a bad step on a jagged patch of dirt, and felt my ankle twist with a sickening, white-hot pop. Adrenaline is a beautiful liar, though. I managed to hobble, limp, and drag myself past the cruiser perimeter, escaping into the chaotic periphery of the raid.
Somehow, I flagged down a ride back to the Bro Bowl. Sitting on the concrete as the longest day of the year finally began to cool down, staring at a swelling, purple ankle, I knew we had won. They had the badges, the jail cells, and the paperwork. But for five glorious, lawless hours, we had the city.
I best Jon Montesi still rips. they called this the “bro bowl” short for “brotha bowl” dubbed this because it was a 70s style snake run bowl or concrete wave, that over time had become surrounded by some of Tampas gnarliest housing projects. kids gather as Ryan Clements gives the run down on the contest details.
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