Pogopalooza: The Pogo Park
The pogo park is the physical centerpiece of Pogopalooza. Composed primarily of various size and height wooden platforms and ledges, it’s designed to take a beating while launching pogo riders higher and higher into the air. As the level of pogoing has progressed, so too has the design of pogo obstacles - becoming larger and sturdier to promote ever crazier gravity defying tricks.
I’ve led the Pogopalooza park design process, construction, and up-keep for many years. In 2013 I began to take it more seriously, designing parks piece-by-piece digitally (instead of a rough sketch on a napkin) to make the build process go MUCH smoother and ensure the final pieces could hold up to the increasing demands of being pogoed on.
Year after year, the most rewarding part of pogo park design has been seeing obstacles used in ways I couldn’t have imagined while building them. Pogoers always find a way to go bigger and bigger.
Below are some highlights from past pogo parks, and some of the design and construction process that has gone into Pogopalooza.
Pogopalooza: Wilkinsburgh, PA
2018 - 2024
Since 2018 Pogopalooza has been held outside the Xpogo LLC headquarters at Community Forge in Wilkinsburg, PA. Keeping the event in the same spot each year has allowed for us to dream even bigger with park construction - creating larger obstacles and making use of the space’s 6ft embankment drop to keep up with the demands of pogo athletes bouncing higher and higher.
Pogopalooza: On The Road 2014-2016
Following years of building an entire park on-site - then ultimately having to destroy it after the event, a new idea emerged: “What if we built a modular park we could store and transport in a box truck”
This approach opened up the possibility to really take Pogopalooza on the road. We were able to use the same park elements at events in Philadelphia, Jacksonville Florida, and in Pittsburgh (at Point State Park and inside Carrie Furnaces.)
Getting Site-Specific
Our venue in Jacksonville, FL was the first time we had the opportunity to incorporate the surrounding architecture into a park layout. I created a to scale mockup of the existing park in SketchUp to plan park layout, and designed an angled box to fit over the existing steps.
Turn On The Bright Lights
In 2016 we brought Pogopalooza to Carrie Furnaces in Swissvale, PA. This was the first and only time the event was held indoors and we had full control over lighting. We were lucky enough to work with some lighting experts to hang industrial stage lights aimed perfectly at the park obstacles while we capitalized on the dimmer peripheral areas to set up a digital projector as a live feed “jumbo-tron” and a handmade (by me with some plywood and a jigsaw) backlit Pogopalooza sign to take center stage behind the judges.
Pogopalooza 10 - NYC 2013
The mission for Pogopalooza 10: build a park that can be disassembled enough to fit in a box truck, load it up at the build site in NJ, get it over to Tompkins SQ park in the East Village, set it up for qualifiers, break it back down and into the truck, set everything back up for finals the next day in Union Square, have a killer palooza, then break the entire park down so it can fit into a dumpster to be carted away.
Months of planning went into the build phase and all the transportation logistics to make this park happen, but it stands the test of time as one of the most memorable and visually stunning pogo parks of all time.
