Presenting: diyskateparks.net

Uploaded on April 30, 2026

Over the last several months I have been taking scans of DIY skateparks.

DIY skateparks are parks that dudes make when they want to make a skatepark, or want to skate something that no one else is skating, or skate something that doesn't exist. Working with the city usually sucks, is hard, and takes too long.

The result of this is dudes just making the park. And unless the park is sick as hell by the time anyone even considers "hey should we destroy this?" then the park instantly gets destroyed. There are a lot of great parks that get destroyed, razed to the ground.

I hear stories about parks that don't exist any more. I've done work on parks, spent money on concrete to be poured in parks that don't exist anymore. I wanted an archive of these parks. It didn't exist, so I made it.

I've been interested in photogrammetry for a while, and this technology was perfect for archiving the parks. Parks are defined by their form and their features. Still photography does a bad job at capturing both of these things – it's difficult to capture the scale and angle of features. Further, the way that you would use a feature is entirely dependent on the subsequent features and space around the feature/space that you are photographing.

By creating 3d models of these parks, the relationships between features and space is preserved and communicated. Using a 3d viewer you can pan, zoom, see angles, and understand a park better than if you looked at a picture of it.

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The website, despite the large amounts of JavaScript that load, is intentionally minimal. I wanted a list of parks, not an interactive map. I want as little interactivity as possible outside of interacting with the model. I hate platforms and I don't want to create another one. When the internet was less intrusive, less tied to user geolocation, there were more lists. This project is an archive not a platform.

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Many of the parks I've scanned exist as "locations" on Google / Apple maps, or have already been scanned using satellite imaging. Some haven't – a lot of these parks exist underneath bridges. I've questioned whether or not it's better to let these parks exist "offline". That being said, all of these parks have a digital + spatial connection in some capacity. There's no chance that I am the first person to take pictures of these parks with a device that contains gps data.

I've resolved this conflict internally by not including any location data on the site. Sometimes I make reference to the highway that it's under, or the dog park, or homeless encampment it's next to (these are all winners when deciding where to put your park – these are places that municipalities don't care about), but never the exact location.

This list exists to say "this park is/ was here". If you can't find it from there, it's not for you.

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To collect these initial 30 parks, I drove from San Francisco to Seattle, back down to SF, then to LA, the Salton Sea, Phoenix, Tuscon, Bisbee, Santa Fe, Amarillo, Tulsa, Kansas City, Iowa City, St Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee. There are a ton of cities in between that I didn't include. I've driven ~7,000 miles since February when I came up with this project. Sometimes I would drive hours to find some park that I heard of, or saw a picture of. I would sometimes find something amazing, and other times I would find rubble or a single quarter pipe.

Here are some pictures from this adventure:

Park in Eugene OR that I love. The build quality feels like a diy but it was made by the city 20+ years ago. Cool as fuck, see a scan here .

Feral Cat Cove. DIY in Portland.

Bridge between Oregon and Washington called the "Bridge of the Gods"

Spooky house with classic Civic in Longview, WA

Crusty ass fun park in Longview WA. Found this one super randomly.

Scary run down shack 80 miles south of Olympia

Awesome basketball court in Olympia wa

11th st diy – Tacoma WA.

Details at Marginal Way. Incredible park.

Met this proto skater / retired guy named Robster at Marginal Way

Sign adjacent to skatepark which threatens children at the behest of the wonderful fence.

This is a quarterpipe in San Luis Obispo that I drove 40 minutes to because this guy told me about this "pretty cool spot". He said there were multiple quarters, which I don't even think used to be true.

Ship on de shore at Bombay Beach

Peacock strutting in Bombay Beach

Bombay Beach Bell Tower – I created the tower part fully in 3d, I couldn't get a good scan of the tower.

Met a buddy named Will who works on skateboard.fyi . He lives part time in Bombay Beach, this is his back yard.

Slab City skatepark. Truly a site to behold. One thing I really like about this park is that it's just called "Skatepark" which is a rarity with diys, which usually distance / distinguish themselves from regular skateparks created with city funding. But when the entire city is DIY, this is just the skatepark.