roller skating

For two months in 2007, the city that has everything did not have a roller rink. Beginning in 2006, the trio of iconic rinks that had managed to survive as nostalgic throwbacks to an era when roller-skating was cool finally succumbed to the national trend and folded.

Weekday roller rink-cum-gay weekend playground the Roxy closed last March to make room for luxury condominiums. The birthplace of roller disco, the Empire Roller Skating Center, in Crown Heights, hosted its final skate last April after 73 years in business. Despite demonstrations to preserve it, the building is now a storage facility. A year earlier Skate Key in the Bronx shut its doors.

Just as roller rink enthusiasts began packing up their grungy, old-school quad skates, Roller Jam USA opened in July on Staten Island at 236 Richmond Valley Road. Perhaps it’s fitting that one of the first new rinks in New York City since the roller disco craze peaked in the early 1980’s would be in Staten Island, the most unabashedly untrendy, family-centric of the five boroughs.Even more fitting that the DJ of Roller Jam’s weekly adult night on Saturday is a Roxy veteran.  read more »