The last skateshop on Pacific Coast Highway.
After forty winters of grip-tape dust and saturated-primary tees, the corner store that taught a generation how to dress is shutting the roll-up door for one final spring drop.
Sal Mendoza opened the roll-up door at 5:42 on a Tuesday in April, the same as every Tuesday since the spring of 1986. Forty winters of grip-tape dust live in the floorboards of the shop he runs on a corner of Pacific Coast Highway, three blocks south of the pier in Laguna. By June the lease ends and the building gets rolled into a juice bar. Sal already has the marker in his back pocket; he plans to tag the front window himself, like he did the first day.
The corner that taught the coast how to dress
The store has never carried more than a hundred tees at a time. A wall of vermilion and royal-blue tribe shirts, a rack of caps, and a sun-bleached board on the ceiling that has not moved since 1991. Most days only the regulars push the door open — old skaters, surf-shop kids on lunch, a kid from Tokyo who flew in last Friday just to buy a hoodie before the lights go off for good.