www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/garden/23sanfran.html
Autos On Location When Skaters Grow Up Peter DaSilva for The New York Times WHERE THE HILLS ARE Jay Shapiro and Claire Bigbie turned a San Francisco Victorian into a skateboarder's dream house.
PENELOPE GREEN Published: April 22, 2009 THE last time Claire Bigbie, now 30, skateboarded in an empty pool, she was 24. But she can easily conjure the stomach-dropping sensation, the sound of the board rasping on the pool coping, the happy effort it took to carve up to that edge.
A Skateboarders Dream House It was a "permission pool" in San Francisco, meaning its owners had given the neighborhood skaters permission to skate there. Pool skating, for those of you who missed "Dogtown and Z-Boys," the 2001 documentary about the sport's early days in the 1970s, emerged in drought-wracked Southern California, when filling a pool was against the law for a time. Early skateboarders found these steep caverns irresistible, irritating the pools' owners, who saw them as vandals and trespassers. Later generations of skateboarders, like Ms Bigbie, consider them legendary. "They were the first wave, and we were the third wave," she said. "Now skateboarding has gone mainstream, and it doesn't mean too much." Still, for Ms Bigbie, an interior designer and aesthetic omnivore, and her boyfriend, Jay Shapiro, 33, a skateboarder who is the bass player for Space Vacation, a heavy metal band in San Francisco, skateboarding -- its renegade, Zen essence -- is a way of life. This is how the empty pool as metaphor and touchstone became a focal point for the tiny Victorian house Ms Bigbie and Mr Shapiro bought in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco four years ago. In the backyard, they planned to sink a swimming pool, and never fill it. As a placeholder, they erected a skate ramp that had belonged to a friend and was made, in part, from reclaimed barn siding. That they achieved the pool as bathroom but not the backyard as skate park is perhaps not surprising. Ms Bigbie and Mr Shapiro met 10 years ago at Skater Island, a now-defunct skate park in Middletown, RI She was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design and living in Providence; Ms Bigbie would drive down on Friday nights to hang out at the park, and she noted Mr Shapiro's fine skating moves and, she said, "I just thought he was really cute." For his part, Mr Shapiro was happy to meet a female skateboarder "who wasn't a weirdo," as he put it. After Ms Bigbie graduated in 2001, the couple lived in London for a year. Ms Bigbie -- who had been collecting furniture since she was 14 (about the same time she started skating) and had designed a skateboard clothing line by 16 and graphics for the indie record company Tooth + Nail by 18 -- worked at the British furniture design company Precious McBane. Mr Shapiro became an assistant to Richie Hopson, a British photographer. When he was offered a job as a team manager for Think Skateboards in San Francisco, they returned, and Ms Bigbie became a stylist for the do-it-yourself magazine Ready Made. They moved into a rental cottage in the Mission along with two dogs (Sen-C, a mutt, and Rollie, a black Labrador), his musical instruments and her furniture. "I had an apartment's worth of furniture by the time I left home for college," Ms Bigbie said. The real estate market was heating up, and they lost out on a few places before buying this one (2,000 square feet including an in-law apartment) for $1 million in 2005. At first, they thought they could renovate it themselves. But as Mr Shapiro and his friends began scooping out its innards -- the house had been divided into two apartments with tiny, dark rooms -- it became clear an architect was needed, if only to obtain building permits.
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