The old skate ramp that once stood near Bolton Park conjures mixed memories for Tony Scutti.
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Every day after school as a teenager in the 1980s, Mr Scutti would take his rollerskates to the vertical ramp to whittle away the evening hours. In that sense, it is a place of fond reminiscing.
But it was also the place where he has experienced the most pain in his 47 years on this earth.
"I was a speed skater, I remember when they first put the ramp up. It was the best thing that ever happened in Wagga," Mr Scutti recalls.
"I'll always remember breaking my wrist there. Me and another bloke, a mate of mine, broke our wrists on the same day, within about an hour. But mine was so bad when I got to the hospital, they rushed me straight to surgery.
Broken in four places, Mr Scutti recalls seeing his left arm look completely disjointed following his fall from the height of the 10-foot ramp.
"The nurses said I could have cleaned the S-bend of a toilet with a hand bent like that," he said.
"In winter, my left wrist still aches a little. It didn't stop me from going back, but I always wore guards after that."
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Aged around 13 at the time, it was just before the school break for Christmas and Mr Scutti recalls, it put a big dampener on his holiday plans.
"Santa bought me a cricket back that year, but it had to be taken back because I couldn't use it," he said.
Consequently, Mr Scutti spent up to five months away from the half-pipe while his wrist, and his ego, recovered.
"I must admit I was a bit scared to go back," he said.
"I still remember it happening. I came down hard, I got up and I just screamed for my mum, which seems strange to me now. I held up my arm and the pain was just so intense, like a sledgehammer."
Despite that pinnacle moment, Mr Scutti's fondest memories are still tied to the vertical ramp, and it launched his career as a speed skater.
Over the years, he became so good he qualified as the Australian junior champion in the sport.
Aside from the competitiveness, it became the site of some iconic 80s-style fun for the youths of Wagga.
"We used to buy bottles of Coke from the [Wagga baths] next door, shake them all up and pour them all over the ramp to make it sticky so we wouldn't slip down it," Mr Scutti remembers.
"I would have been there every afternoon after school from age eight to 16, and in the summer, we'd go from the pool to the ramp all afternoon."
Before relocating to Mullumbimby at the end of his high school career in 1992, Stuart Glastonbury made the Wagga ramp his second home as well.
"I lived four years of my life on that ramp," Mr Glastonbury said.
"In a rural town like Wagga, you've got to play a major sport or there's not much for you to do.
"For a lot of my friends, the vert ramp was all we had. There was another in Albury, and a big one in Canberra and we used to get some of those guys coming up to ours too.
"It was amazing we had it, it was pretty unusual to have something so amazing in a rural town."
The introduction to the sport in Wagga led to a lifelong passion for Mr Glastonbury. Over the years, he gained enough experience to even land a corporate sponsorship to travel around the country for competitions.
Such is his affinity with the sport, he recently built a replica ramp in his North Coast backyard.
Similarly to Mr Scutti, the ramp does represent a place of significant pain in Mr Glastonbury's memory.
"Some of my friends broke their arms, I broke my wrist a number of times, but we were always conscious of wearing our safety gear," he said.
"We all wore helmets. That was a compulsory part of using the ramp."
When the vertical skating craze died down worldwide, Wagga's ramp was halved to 5-foot high and taken to Borambola.
"I remember when it was cut down. I think I was in year 12, I was so disappointed," Mr Glastonbury said.
"It's such a shame, it was iconic for Wagga for a long time.
"There used to be yearly skate demos down there, we had comps, it served an amazing part of the community. Without it, a lot of kids wouldn't have had an outlet."
But Mr Glastonbury hopes, there may be a resurgence of appeal that could see the city revive its once-thriving skate culture.
"There's still the [skate] park in Wagga, and the one out in Kooringal is really fun. The city still has elements of that culture," he said.
"Over the years though, skating has gone from a counter-culture to now being included in the [up-coming] Olympics."