Skate spots, like people, die. And also like people, spots die in a variety of different ways. Some are given a swift and honorable death, like EMB, and others just slowly fade into irrelevance, like the big gap at Carlsbad High.
Sometime during the late 90′s Joel Patterson wrote a piece in Transworld titled “Participation is 9/10 the law.” The point of it was that most fans of skating are skateboarders themselves, a contrast to the sweatpant-wearing cheerer-ons of traditional sports such as football and basketball, who often have no experience as participants. Skateboarding is more of a “spectator sport” now than it was when Patterson wrote this, but spectators remain mostly irrelevant to the core skate world. Regardless of how enthusiastically they wave their foam hands, they will never be given the respect of one who actually skates.