The Domestication of the Skateboard: San Francisco Battled Its Skateboarding Community for Decades. Then Silicon Valley Stepped In. 

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"Think of the way people are portrayed riding on a magic carpet in a Disney movie," he says. And then, he adds, compare that to a mall cop riding a Segway — "not very cool."

Not surprisingly, Boosted Boards earned gushing reviews from tech bloggers, and sold so well among the 25- to 35-year-old male population in Silicon Valley that the founders turned their Kickstarter setup into a bona fide cottage industry. (They now have a 10-worker assembly line, and an ever-expanding engineering team).

There are, of course, other iterations. In January, another Stanford engineer named Kyle Doerksen launched a Kickstarter campaign for Onewheel, a self-balancing, motorized board with a giant tire in the center. Its software algorithms allow riders to carve the pavement as though they're surfing a wave, Doerksen says in promotional videos. He's also based in Mountain View, where new board gadgetry is apparently a growth industry.

That's rattled people in the skateboarding scene, who, as Watson notes, have long been wary of "other wheeled activities." Thompson views the new inventions as an affront.

"I was on Van Ness one morning, and I saw this guy coming up McAllister on one of those things," he says. "And you know, I can just tell when someone looks uncomfortable on a skateboard. His legs were super spread apart, he had this really stiff stance. I was like, 'How do you go from like, not riding a skateboard, to riding an electric skateboard? You're out of your mind, man. You're gonna kill yourself.'"

He pauses bitterly. "You have to learn to ride around the block, pay your dues, then take it to the streets — like what kids do."

It irks him that someone could bypass that learning curve with a piece of technology. And it suggests that a gritty street culture could ultimately be supplanted by something sleek, expensive, and new.

"When I saw that," Thompson says, "it freaked me out, kind of."

It gets weirder. In October, a husband-and-wife team from Los Altos launched a Kickstarter campaign to make their own line of hoverboards — like the floating decks that first appeared in 1989's Back to the Future Part II. Hendo Hoverboard inventors, Jill and Greg Henderson, built a prototype that flies an inch off the ground, owing to its deftly crafted magnetic levitation system. Their marketing pitch — tailored to the same audience of technology-obsessed pragmatists who made the Boosted Board so popular — promises "a vehicle with all the freedom of a car, and all the efficiency of a high-speed train."

Within days of launching the campaign, they'd garnered $416,764 in donations, well over their $100,000 goal.

"It's definitely cool," Boosted Board enthusiast Colin Sebern says, "but it's not in any way a competitor to Boosted." To him, the difference is stark. Hendo is a toy. Boosted is a transportation solution.

Thompson is the owner of Mission Skateboards, a tiny storefront on 24th Street with graffitied votive candles and chipped skate decks in the display windows — one of them is decorated with old Muni bus transfers. The shop itself enshrines an older era of skateboard culture; Thompson is an unapologetic purist. At 43, he still can't cotton to the longboards that overtook suburban streets and college campuses in the early aughts ("It's a different customer — older white guys," he says) and he can't envision ever piggybacking on the electric skateboard trend. When people call to ask if he carries Boosted Boards, he gets insulted.

Granted, his business is still chugging along, as are other shops, like FTC Skateboarding on Haight Street. Thrasher magazine still prints monthly issues from its headquarters in the Bayview, and there are at least as many wood skateboards along Market Street as electric versions. Despite the law, cops seem disinclined to stop them. Perhaps skateboards are thriving as a nostalgia-based trend. Perhaps they've lost their outlaw appeal, but remained viable as a form of smog-free transportation. And maybe the designer products from Silicon Valley helped facilitate that change.

What has deteriorated, though, is the once-sacred, resolutely uncivilized culture of skateboarding. Hubba Hideout is gone; skaters at the Embarcadero are now relegated to a small plaza in front of the ferry building. There's a security guard permanently on watch at Union Square, so the only time to skate there is between midnight and 5 a.m. (Longtime local skater Ando Caulfield says that despite the city's best efforts, Union Square remains "an amazing place for skateboarding.") Skaters who once congregated at EMB are now drifting out to the avenues or into the Bayview. By the mid-aughts, they'd become the stuff of museum dioramas.

That's no overstatement. In 2004, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts mounted "Beautiful Losers," an exhibit featuring street art that had once lived on the margins of society. It included an installation of hand-drawn skate decks by original Dogtown board designer Wes Humpston, and a 7-foot wooden bowl sculpture that looked like an empty swimming pool; museum curators invited local skaters in to give it a test run. Pianist Jason Moran tried a similar experiment when he appeared at the SFJAZZ Center last year, transforming his stage into a 36-by-20-foot half-pipe and enlisting 10 skateboarders to ride it while his quartet played in the background.

But that's what happens. San Francisco is abstractly interested in its skateboard history, but only to the extent that it can be distilled in an art exhibit, or circumscribed in a stage performance, or remembered in a wistful essay.

And, with the rise of electric boards, the skateboard follows so many other facets of San Francisco's culture into assimilation. It's a clean, efficient way to get around a city with its own powerful urge to go somewhere, even if it's not entirely clear where.