A tour of the Tobey skate park design

Our preliminary skate park design has been posted on the web! Shown above is the bird's eye view of the Tobey skate park design. If you would like to see other angles of the design, go to the Wormhoudt Inc website where Zach Wormhoudt's firm has posted images showing multiple views of the park. Check it out.

Let's a take a little tour of the lay-out so we can fully appreciate the careful thought that has gone into designing our skate park.

Terrain is all inclusive

One of the big mistakes commonly seen in skate parks is the absence of a gradual transition from beginner features to advanced features. Sometimes a park will host mostly beginner terrain but then have few intermediate or advanced areas or you will see parks that have beginner and advanced elements but lack intermediate terrain. For example, the Oxford skate park has an incredible advanced area that is 6-10 feet high that abruptly transitions to a beginner area that is only 3 feet. Going from 3 to 6 feet requires huge jump in skill level that few will make at a younger age. Ideally you would have some 4 and 5 foot terrain mixed in as well.

As shown in the image below, the Tobey skate park lay-out is designed to have a diverse type of terrain that caters to a large range of skill levels and skate styles.

The green squiggled line marks the beginner/intermediate area. The yellow line marks the street area which is for intermediate and advanced users. The black line marks the intermediate advanced area.



The beginner area hosts a feature known as the snake run. For a teaser/preview of what we can expect the snake run to look like, check out the Venice beach snake run being skating by six year old Asher Bradshaw in the this YouTube video. The snake-run is about 40 seconds into the video. Pretty amazing feature and kid!

In the picture below the the "snake path" is shown as a green line while red dotted arcs indicate areas in the snake run that will be used by more advanced users. These dotted arcs represent places where users will jump or "ollie" over sections of the run.

There is another beginner area outlined with a black circle. This area hosts a mini-halfpipe feature that will allow 4-5 year old kids to learn how to skate while also keeping kids out of high traffic areas. This is an important feature to have in order to minimize collisions with younger children.






Intermediate/Advanced bowl Area

There are two bowls in the area that are connected to each other. There is a five foot intermediate bowl (circled with the red dotted line) and there is the advanced bowl ( circled with the solid red line). The advanced bowl ranges from 6 to 10 feet in height. All levels of skateboarders will enjoy this area, however what makes this area advanced is the height of deeper bowl. Beginners and intermediate skaters will roll around the bottom of these bowls while the advanced riders will actually ride and grind on top edges of the large bowl. Advanced riders will also be able to launch 2-6 feet into the air because of the height and the design of the two interconnected bowls.



Street area

There are eleven street features ( circled and numbered below in yellow) which include a flat rail (1), a low down rail (2), step-up fun box (3), snake-run ledge (4), table-top step down (5), hubba ledge (6), return flat-bank (7), gap ledge (8), back extension ledge (9), a bank to bank (10) and a curved hubba ledge combination (11). It's quite amazing that Zach could squeeze these many features into a 10,000 square foot space.



All in all, we are going to have a fantastic park! Although our park will not be big, it will be packed with stuff that will be fun for all different ability levels. My guess is that parents who have not skated for years will have a hard time just sitting there and watching there kids skate-it will turn into a family affair. Let's get this park built!