Boy swinging his girl on roller skates, Savoy Ballroom, Chicago, 1941. Photograph by Russell Lee. Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
It’s a Sunday night at Fleetwood Roller Skating Rink in Summit, Illinois. The crowd is thin, likely a result of the Super Bowl being televised at this very moment. The game is playing, muted, on a television mounted above the lockers in the snack bar, but the skaters could care less about who is winning or losing, because there is skating to do.
Skaters of every skill level rotate counterclockwise across the shining maple floor, dappled by colorful twinkling lights. At the edge of the skating surface, a middle-aged man grips the wall for balance, struggling to find coordination, while a girl in striped leg warmers and eyeliner bolts ahead of an older woman, skating confidently but slowly to avoid the more chaotic skaters. A teen in a Tupac shirt falls ungracefully on their backside after attempting to perform a complicated move but quickly gets up to speed past a crowd to join their friends. An inline skater in flared orange pants glides effortlessly—backwards—while engaging in conversation with the rink referee. Time and time again, skaters fall—even the experienced ones—and get back up, shaking off any level of embarrassment because everyone on skates has been there. The Bangles “Walk Like an Egyptian” follows a song by Bad Bunny released just last month, yet at the middle of the floor, a gaggle of skaters wearing headphones has formed, each twirling to their own music. Beyond the snack bar, the brightly colored carpet, a roller skate pattern, glows under the blacklight while a claw machine beckons for your quarters.
The first purposefully built roller skating rink opened in Chicago in 1880, but spectators had been drawn to the sport since a skating exhibition was shown at the Illinois State Fair in 1868, and a previous rink had been located at the corner of Wabash Avenue and Jackson Boulevard in the Loop. Excitement for the roller skating craze had been making its way west to Chicago since New York-based inventor James Plimpton developed the “rocking” or “quad” skate in 1863, an improvement upon previous roller skate models that made stopping and turning difficult.
Not unlike the skates used today, Plimpton, a furniture designer by trade, marketed his skates via a rink that he designed inside his furniture showroom. The Chicago Roller Skating Rink opened at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway (now Ida B. Wells Drive) for the fall 1880 season amidst a flurry of excitement. The single-story brick building had an asphalt skating surface upon which men and women could mingle freely, causing proponents of Victorian morality to object vociferously to the ample opportunities for flirtation and the scandal of women lifting their legs—a movement that did not occur during the waltzes popular in Chicago’s ballrooms.
The popularity of roller skating in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century would face opposition from members of the clergy as well as saloon and theater owners. The pastime was drawing people away from church services and socials, matinees, and even bars—the antagonism creating a rare moment of common ground for disparate communities. By 1885, the Chicago Roller Skating Rink had been joined by others across the city. The Casino was located at 2418 South State Street. The Casino offered exhibition skating and live music by a string band. “For the first time Chicago possesses a rink that is elegant and perfect in all of its appointments,” shared the Chicago Tribune in 1884.1 The Casino was illuminated by stained glass windows and had room for three thousand spectators. The Princess Roller Skating Rink was located at 556–560 West Madison Street, and the Washington Boulevard Rink, at the corner of Washington Boulevard and Curtis Street, was outfitted with marble finishes and an expansive truss roof system. On the North Side, The Le Grand Roller Skating Rink at Clark and Elm Streets was heated by steam and lit by electricity, and had a live band, which played from a platform suspended from the middle of the rink.
“Roller skating is at best a craze, and is no worse than other crazes, such as tobogganing, bobbing, progressive euchre, 4-o’clock teas, metaphysical seances, and other mild forms of insanity, at which all that is charged against roller skating may be committed,” wrote a commenter to the Chicago Tribune in 1885.2 This craze caused ballroom owners to trade their waltzes for wheels, offering skate nights to patrons, while others would convert whole ballrooms to skating entirely. While there was no skating rink amongst the attractions of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the exposition led to an interest in permanent parks with recreational amenities like arcades, dance halls, and roller skating rinks. In 1899, the Sans Souci Amusement Park, located on South Cottage Grove Avenue at 63rd Street, built the largest skating rink in the city. The White City Amusement Park, given the nickname of the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition, opened at 63rd Street and South Parkway (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) in 1917. The North Side’s beloved Riverview Amusement Park opened in 1904 at Western and Belmont Avenues with a roller rink as an attraction.
Boosting the craze was the Chicago Roller Skate Company, which began manufacturing skates specifically for rink skating in 1905, after the owner of the Chicago Coliseum threw a skate at the company’s president, Walter Ware, demonstrating his contempt for a skate that did not perform well indoors.3 In 1920, the Chicago Roller Skate Company began manufacturing Rink Style Leather boots, a departure from previous models that strapped on to a person’s own shoe.4 Now based in New Jersey, the company is still manufacturing its “Chicago Skates.”
The Chicago Roller Skate Company was founded by brothers Ralph and Walter Ware in Chicago. Courtesy of Chicago Skates.
Black Chicagoans were only allowed to work in Chicago’s early roller rinks; they could not skate in them. The Le Grand Roller Rink hired Black attendants for the men’s and women’s lounges, and de facto segregation ruled at all but a few of Chicago’s early roller rinks under Black ownership. In 1907, the Château De La Plaisance Amusement Park opened at 5324–26 South State Street. A roller rink as an attraction within, named The Leland Giants (after the Negro League Baseball team that played in Chicago at the time) opened in 1910.5 “Come away from the stuffy, tubercular death-giving cheap theater and enjoy the invigorating, health-giving atmosphere at the Chateau,” read an ad in the Chicago Defender from January 1910 for the park’s skating rink. Skating had been cheaper than visiting one of Chicago’s movie palaces or vaudeville theaters, and now, as Chicago had just opened its first Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, which was not segregated, in response to a growing outbreak, it was endorsed as a way to avoid the disease. Music at the Leland Giants Rink was provided by the First Regiment Knights of Pythias Band.6
The Lincoln Garden Skating Rink opened in the fall of 1913 at 29th and State Streets and included a refreshment room and a system of “75,000 candle lights and the latest power organ.”7 In 1923, the Joyland Amusement Park opened at 3301 South Wabash Avenue with a roller rink, though the park closed after only two seasons. In 1938, James C. Davis, an assistant manager at the white-owned Savoy Ballroom at 47th Street and South Parkway, convinced the owners to dedicate one evening a week to roller skating.8 Davis’s suggestion made the Savoy a popular place for skating and live jazz music—a departure from the Wurlitzer organ present at many skating rinks. In 1947, Davis became the manager of The White City Roller Rink, and in 1963 opened the Savoy 51 Roller Rink at 7845 South Cottage Grove.9
Instructors in roller skating at Savoy Ballroom, Chicago, 1941. Photograph by Russell Lee. Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
Couple talking at roller skating rink of Savoy Ballroom, Chicago, 1941. Photograph by Russell Lee. Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
Roller skating at the Savoy Ballroom on Saturday night, Chicago, 1941. Photograph by Russell Lee. Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
The White City Roller Rink lived up to its name. The White City Amusement Park had closed in 1933, but the roller rink remained—for white patrons only, despite being located in an area that was increasingly populated by Black Chicagoans. Despite civil rights laws in place in Illinois as early as 1885 forbidding discrimination in public places such as theaters, hotels, and restaurants, a cultural practice of discrimination still occurred, and white business owners could sustain it via a number of tactics, including telling Black patrons that they were closing, at capacity, or by creating fake organizations or clubs, and claiming that those looking to patronize a business would need to be members of a club in order to gain entry.
In the spring of 1942, members of the newly formed Congress for Racial Equity (CORE) decided to expose this practice at the White City Roller Rink, and its fictitious “White City Roller Club.” Twenty-four members of CORE went to the skating rink, with none being members of the private club. White members of CORE paid for tickets and were allowed to enter, while a Black member was asked to show a club card before entering, despite a ticket being purchased for them—by a white patron.10 Other white members of CORE were explicitly told that they did not have to have club cards to enter, and that this was a tactic deployed to keep Black skaters out.11 Other Black members of CORE were told that the rink was closing early. CORE formed a committee to speak to management at the rink, who insisted that the club was authentic. CORE members began to picket the White City Skating Rink. Among those picketing were Black World War II veterans, who held up signs reading “The draft boards did not exclude Negroes.”12 CORE sued the management of the rink, but according to Erasing the Color Line by George Mills Houser, a founding member of CORE who participated in both the demonstrations at the White City Roller Rink and the organization’s sit-ins at segregated Chicago restaurants, the case was dismissed because most of the witnesses were no longer in Chicago. The White City rink desegregated and changed its name to Park City in 1947. The rink closed two years later.
The size and open floor space of utilitarian buildings, including National Guard armories and a cable car warehouse, proved to be effectively adaptively reused as roller rinks, and provided an opportunity for large rinks to accommodate free skaters, dance technique-oriented skaters, and exhibition events. The first ever roller derby was held at the Chicago Coliseum, located at 1513 South Wabash, in 1935.13 A sports and event venue, the Coliseum was also the first home of the Chicago Blackhawks, and had held roller skating events as early as 1902.14 In 1943, the 1890 First Regiment Infantry Armory building at 1552 South Michigan Avenue opened to the public for skating, boasting a nearly 35,000-square-foot rink floor. In 1980, the Rainbo Roller Skating Rink opened in a circa 1900 building that had been a theater, a ballroom, an ice skating rink, and a music venue called the Kinetic Playground.15
The Armory Roller Skating Rink at 5917 North Broadway opened as the Winter Garden Ice Skating Rink in 1916. Between its tenure as an ice rink and roller rink, it was used by the Illinois National Guard for drills and training, and became known as the Broadway Armory, as it was the headquarters for the 202nd Coast Artillery.16 Converted into a skating rink in the 1930s, the Broadway Armory was billed as the “World’s Largest Rink” with a skating surface of nearly 35,000 square feet (the same as the Armory on Michigan Avenue). In 1978, the City of Chicago Park District took out a lease with the State, and the building was converted into a fieldhouse. The Broadway Armory no longer offers roller skating, but unlike earlier skating rinks in Chicago, the building is still extant.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, many roller rinks in Chicago would close, and new rinks would open in the suburbs, including Fleetwood Roller Skating Rink in Summit, which opened in 1957. The Glenwood Skating Rink in Glenwood opened in 1965 and the Tinley Park Roller Rink opened in 1965. Lynwood Roller Rink opened in 1975. These south suburban venues would keep the sport alive, as well as build and sustain a skating culture unique to Chicago.
By 1975, Chatham residents and avid skaters Carmen Clark and Nate Simpson had grown tired of traveling to the suburbs to skate. That year, the couple converted a former automobile dealership at 8920 South Ashland Avenue into The Rink. Eight years later, The Rink moved to a former electrical warehouse at 1122 East 87th Street, where it remains to this day. While other skating rinks continued to employ organists at a Wurlitzer playing foxtrots and waltzes, The Rink began to offer something different: rhythm & blues 45s spun by a DJ.17 This music inspired a new kind of skating, influenced by the dancing of James Brown, which came to be known as “JB skating.”
JB skating combines crisscross footwork, dips, spins, and exuberance with wheels in motion. The style isn’t limited to the music of James Brown. It is demonstrated across a range of musical genres spanning everything from Lorde’s “Royals” to Earth Wind and Fire, the Bangles, Bad Bunny, and back again. JB skating has spread across the country, but its origins are grounded on Chicago’s South Side.
The popularity of skating has ebbed and flowed over decades and has been influenced by popular culture and trends. While the roller skating “craze” that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century happened via exhibitions, the interest at the mid-twentieth century was driven by an interest in wholesome family activities by companies like the Chicago Roller Skating Company and the Roller Skating Foundation of America, which was founded in 1937. The rise of youth culture in the United States in the mid-twentieth century gave roller skating a permanent place among nostalgic activities. Across the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, school systems would host skating parties for students in elementary, middle, and high schools at area rinks, providing young people with an opportunity to interact with their classmates outside of the classroom in a way that mimicked but exaggerated the complexities of the adult world.
In the late 1970s, disco took to wheels. Roller disco gave skaters an opportunity to enjoy the music, fashions, and dancing of the Disco phenomenon outside of the nightclubs. The 1980 musical film Xanadu starred Olivia Newton-John as a goddess on roller skates, sent to earth to help a struggling artist and a former big band leader open a roller disco with 1940s retro sensibilities. Xanadu amped up an interest in roller skating, and more rinks began offering disco dance and roller disco.
Roller derby at the Chicago Coliseum embraced women and queer people from its inception in 1935, making roller derby, and the culture of many rinks, inclusive for both women and LGBTQIA skaters. With its many songs of empowerment and resilience, disco brought the visibility of Queer culture to both the dancefloor and the skating rink. Prior to its closure in 2003, Rainbo held a Gay Monday night skate that occurred over decades of the rink’s existence.
Skating rinks modernize, but the music and environment has remained consistent since the Xanadu era—with room for additions that work with the atmosphere. The crowd at Fleetwood is reminded of this as the closing synthesizer lines of Chaka Khan and Rufus’s “Ain’t Nobody,” a song released in 1982, bubble out from the DJ booth before the Fleetwood DJ makes an announcement. “Attention skaters: for those of you still hungry, the snack bar is running a pizza sale! Fifty cents a slice.” A group of teen boys at the center of the rink is resting on their toe stops after a series of pirouettes and discussing the possibility of discount pizza.
Since the first skating rinks appeared in Chicago in the 1880s, skating rinks have added cosmic lights, claw machines, pizza, and Latin Trap, but the basic framework remains: skaters on skates, a rink, music, and fun—all of which concludes as the Fleetwood DJ announces the last song of this Sunday night. Skaters awkwardly shuffle over the neon carpet to remove their skates and return to their wheelless lives. Outside, the sign above the door is still illuminated and turning, displaying an inline skate on one side, and a roller skate on the other, reminding skaters that if you are willing to keep trying, you too might be able to spin on skates.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Alex Ensign for buying her a pair of skates as a birthday gift in 2021.
