Summer Skates at Vintage Rinks

In 1983 it cost $3.25 for an afternoon of roller skating bliss 🛼

Photo by Jessica Christian on Unsplash

By Elizabeth Poland Shugg

It’s a summer Saturday afternoon in 1985. My sister, cousin, and I have 1–4 p.m. cleared for a session at Skate Inn in Athens, Georgia. We’ve been waiting all week for this.

Cold air gushes through the ticket window as we step up to pay for admission: $3.25 for three hours of roller skating bliss—nearly a month’s allowance for my sister and me, but worth every penny. We enter the large rectangular building and feast our eyes on its sparkly, 15,000-square-foot concrete rink.

“You Dropped the Bomb on Me” by The Gap Band welcomes us into the rink’s cathartic atmosphere. Multicolored disco ball reflections flicker across the smooth floor. Laughter and joy await as we lace up our skates.

Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” fires up just as we roll out.

Photo by Regina Valetova on Unsplash

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Roller Skating: A History

Belgian inventor John Joseph Merlin developed the first roller skate prototype in the mid 1760s, but the inventor with the most United States skate patents was James Leonard Plimpton, who made a series of improvements to the design during the 1860s and also founded the New York Roller Skating Association (NYRSA). 

In 1866, the NYRSA leased the Atlantic House Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island—which had served temporarily as home to the United States Naval Academy during the Civil War—and converted its dining room into a rink to introduce roller skating to the area. Rinks started popping up across the U.S. during the 1870s. 

An 1880 wood engraving of a skating rink in Washington, D.C., courtesy of the Library of Congress

The years between 1937 and 1959 are known as the “golden age of roller skating.”

But during the 1950s and 1960s, desegregation impacted how roller rinks operated. Black skaters staged protests and sit-ins at rinks that wouldn’t allow them to skate, which led to rinks holding specific nights for white and black skaters. During those nights, black people could skate freely and express themselves. This led to birth of jam, hip-hop, and rhythm skating.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the roller disco era took hold of America’s youth, leading President Ronald Reagan to declare October National Roller Skating Month in 1983. After the recession of 2008, many rinks closed. But alas, some survived to host the perfect vintage summer activity.

Roll back into vintage roller skating fun this summer. Here’s our list of rinks you can still enjoy around the Southeast.