Where the Music Rolled on: Roller Rinks, Hip-Hop's Forgotten Stage
We revisit the long neglected part of history when Roller Rinks were the Arenas of the late 70s and early 80s
I ain’t never been on a pair of roller skates.
I don’t like collared greens either. It’s amazing that I haven’t had my Black card revoked.
Because growing up…EVERYONE could skate. All the kids from Hudson to Forest would take the trek to Skate City out in Aurora which is why we ain’t never went skating.
We couldn’t leave the block.
Cher was in Brooklyn at the famous Empire Skating Rink. The popular cop show CHIPS had an episode dedicated to “Roller Disco.” Skating was all the rage. If you lived in that era, there are two characters that you’ll remember being on skates: Tootie in Facts of Life, and that scout on skates from The Punks gang in The Warriors.
But when skating died down as a fad, we kept at it. Not just in Park Hill, across the country. Skating may have been a fad for some people, peaking in the summer of 1979, but for Black folks young and old it was a part of our culture.
Skating, Roller Skating, Jam Skating, Fastback Skating, Snap, whatever you call it, being on four wheels was as Black as Black eyed peas and collard greens. Skating rinks united generations and neighborhoods.
Because radio didn’t play Rap and there was only a few Rap videos (which weren’t played on MTV or BET) Skating Rinks were one of the main mediums for the spread of Rap music.
So sit back while we hopscotch across the nation — from the Northeast, to the South, to the Midwest, and the West — and take a look at the importance that the Skating Rink played in the world of Rap for little over a decade.
To begin our tale it must start like all things Rap, the 304 square miles of New York City in general, the 22 square miles of Manhattan and the 42 square miles of the Bronx in particular.
The culture that would soon be known as Hip-Hop wasn’t even a decade old. Had it been a person, Hip-Hop would have been a first grader. The year was 1981 and, although Recorded Rap had exposed the majority of the world to people rhyming on records, the myth was that the DJ, Rapper, B-Boy dynamic was almost exclusively experienced in the Borough of the Bronx.
In reality, like Writing, the culture had spread throughout the city. And, as Nelson George pointed out:
Even as early as 1979, before “Rapper’s Delight,” MCs like Kurtis Blow were playing venues like the Diplomat Hotel in Times Square and (yes) roller rinks in Jamaica, Queens. There were also venues like Harlem World on 116th Street. By 1981 there were rapping and break dancing crews all over the city. Kids were spinning on card board in parks. DJ’s were playing break beats at parties. Records were being released.
As we talked about here, two visionaries, Michael Holman and Fab Five Freddy saw what was going on in the Bronx as the next big cultural movement in America. Up until that point, it was just something the youth of New York did.
Connecting with downtown folk like Blondie, Malcolm McClaren, and Ruza Blue (who ran McClaren’s boutique), Holman and Freddy worked to bring downtown to uptown and eventually the BX B-boys and B-girls downtown.
First, they had to find a venue. McClaren, who had traversed the Bronx streets with Holman and saw Afrika Bambattaa, requested that Bambattaa and his Zulu Nation open up for him. Holman happily complied, recruited Bam, the Zulus, and B-boy and B-girl alike.
Shook by the culture, Ruza Blue asked Holman if they could reproduce that same thing again — Thursday nights — at a club called Negril.
Again, the request was carried out and carried out so successfully that they quickly outgrew Negril.
They needed an even bigger venue and Fab Five Freddy had a solution — a Roller Disco in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea— a place known as The Roxy.
Students of Hip-Hop will recognize that name from the campy, cult film Beat Street. The Roxy is the place where the best scene of the entire movie, the B-boy battle, took place.
Although The Roxy didn’t exactly serve the same purpose as Roller Rinks elsewhere, what is common is The Roxy was one of the largest venue that Rap music had ever been heard in. Prior to The Roxy, most Hip-Hop clubs were tiny in comparison and up until Run-DMC, most Rappers were opening acts for R&B groups or whatever artist was popular at the time.
The Roxy was Hip-Hop culture writ large and Roller Rinks elsewhere soon became the venue for breaking Rap records and promoters also began to book Rinks for Rap shows in other states.
Sixty miles south of New York City, in the city that once exported china, rubber, wire rope, and cigars, where you’re greeted on the Lower Trenton Bridge with the slogan, “Trenton Makes, The World Takes,” Trenton was developing its own Rap scene. The center for that scene — Capitol Roller Rink.
In a pattern that would be similar in other cities, the Roller Rink DJ, in this case DJ Ready Red, had fallen in love with Rap music while visiting family in Hempstead in 79. He evenually landed a gig at Capitol and began to play the music to the young, skating audience (DJ Ready Red would later move to Houston and become a founding member of the Geto Boys…but that’s later).
Red got to know many of the New York mover and shaker types as he was their Trenton connection. Arthur Armstrong of Ecstasy Garage Fame and one of the first great Rap promoters would bring heavy hitters like Cold Crush (and fledging acts like the Skinny Boys) to perform at Capitol Roller Rink. Russell Simmons also would come down to Trenton in the early days of Rush Management with Kurtis Blow, Jeckyll & Hyde, and his other groups.
It was the place to be.
Poor Righteous Teacher’s Wise Intelligent recalls sneaking in Capitol and Red as being one of the cutting edge DJs in Trenton.
Now, Trenton sits between New York and Philadelphia. Surely they could have picked up a radio station from either city. If neither of those signals made it, there was always Newark’s WHBI and the World Famous Supreme Team Show.
Despite that, DJ Ready Red still broke records at Capitol.
Meanwhile, 216 miles to the North (of New York), Boston’s Rap scene was also growing. In highly segregated Boston, groups performed in local community centers and block parties but one of the premier places for acts to perform was the Dorchester located Chez Vous Roller Skating Rink:
Back then, the frequent summer block parties on Capen St., Humboldt Ave. and Castlegate Rd. and shows at the Chez Vous roller skating rink, local middle schools and community centers were largely peaceful affairs that served as a unifying force for the community. Pacey C Foster
Foster continues:
Between 1983 and 1985, Rusty “the Toe Jammer” Pendleton alone performed 16 documented shows. Many were self produced parties like the 1983 “Atomic Dog Night” at the Chez Vous roller skating rink that included Dwayne Omarr and the dance crew the New York Puppeteers.
The Chez Vous continued to be a place for Rap, a place where up and coming Rappers from New York & New Jersey would perform preceeded by a local opening act. TDS Mob, the two DJ (DJ Michael K and DJ Devastator) one MC (Kool Gee) group, the first Boston group to have their video get national exposure, remembers opening for Queen Latifah in 1988 at the Chez Vous:
She actually sat and watched our show and was impressed and let us know. She said, ‘You guys need some New York connections. Your stage show is really right. You’re too good to be a local opening act DJ Michael K
That’s how Rap developed and spread in the Northeast. Arthur Armstrong doesn’t get enough credit for his work — he took the Bronx scene to the people. Surely Russell Simmons’ promoter days played a major part in that development as well.
Cities like Boston and others started producing their own Recorded Rap in the mid to late 80s so the music in these cities developed along the same lines as New York’s.
But it was a totally different ballgame in other regions.
John Glorieux is a part of Recession-proof business. While companies all over America were downsizing, Glorieux was expanding. He bought a swath of land on South Federal Highway close to the airport and built a $4 million facility on it. Business poured in.
The business that Glorieux invested in is the pet boarding business. And business is booming. The swath of land he purchased? It’s a place where he and many others have fond memories.
I spent countless hours there playing Pac Man in that back corner. It’s a bad thing for the skate junkies, but it’s good for your dogs. John Glorieux
Yup, where Lauderdale Pet Lodge stands now is the former home of Luke Skyywalker/Ghetto Style DJ’s Pac Jam parties — Gold Coast Roller Rink, a place so revered that tons of posts were dedicated to the closing of the Fort Lauderdale institution. It had been a part of the community since 1947.
Of course, a lot of those memories are revisionist ones as writer upon writer talked of the “multi-cultural” atmosphere.
That ain’t how Uncle Luke remembers it:
At the time, not very many rinks let real DJs into the premises, especially African-American DJs, because the rinks around here were predominantly white. But on Sundays, when the rink was supposedly closed and the white kids were off doing their thing somewhere else, that’s when they let us in to do our thing.
In this excellent interview done by A.J. Samuels for Electronic Beats Magazine, Luke also goes into detail about the music that he played at Gold Coast:
What we brought to the rink was a total change of music. This also included the concerts we had there. And the music that we brought to the rink wasn’t yet Miami bass. Rather, I created Miami bass in the skating rink. But there was a lot of electro, hip-hop, Herbie Hancock, Egyptian Lover, Mantronix, sometimes slowed-down, dragging, bass-heavy Kraftwerk and Original Concept.
In other cultures, Gold Coast would have been marked as a landmark, turned into a museum, and visited by people for years to come for that reason alone. The music that Luke created in the Gold Coast Roller Rink, once seen as a joke, is now revered as the precursor to modern Rap (which certainly has inherited the stripper-centric culture that Luke parties/concerts were infamous for).
Luke was also a promoter who brought down many of the New York groups for the first time — we’re talking Run DMC, Divine Sounds, etc — and Luke introduced his audience to their music. He broke local acts as well:
Back then I was on this [thing like] “I’ll break your song,” because I’m playing at a skating ring with 2,000 people on Sunday, I’m playing at the park Sunday at the daytime with 3,000 people and on Friday night I’m playing at the local high school with another 1,500 people. Your music was getting played to all these different people and I’ll break your song because I stand behind it. Uncle Luke
Those 2,000 people that Luke mentioned above were a captive audience. While people would skate on the outer ring, in the middle, folks danced. But the music that Luke played kept everyone involved. It’s safe to say that a movement was born on 2604 S Federal Hwy.
Sadly, in American culture, none of that matters. Despite renovations, the crowds never reached the peak numbers of the 80s. There simply wasn’t enough people going to Gold Coast to keep the place open. So it made sense that owner, Joseph Latona, would divest himself from the burden. Gold Coast has literally gone to the dogs.
I never knew what to call Texas.
It’s not the East and it’s not really the West. My sister in laws’ younger brother C3 summed it up best for me, “We’re not the East Coast or the West Coast…we’re the Gulf Coast.”
First time I heard that, I died laughing. But I’ve always appreciated the fact that Texans define themselves. So some people will claim the West. They can do that. But a lot of Texans claim the South and that’s why we’re lumping it in with Miami. Our focus will be on Houston.
For a lot of New York-centered Rap fans, Houston Hip-Hop begins with “My Mind’s Playing Tricks on Me.” Surely, there’s no denying the power of that song. But Rap had been bubbling in Houston long before that.
In fact, the scene matured in a way that the common self-proclaimed Rap Historian can relate to. The scene matured out of competition — competition between DJs, and as if they did it for this article — competition between two Roller Rinks: Super Skate and Rainbow Rolling Rink.
What’s cool about this competition though is it was mostly between two friends, DJ Walter D and Sir Pace, both teenagers at the time.
The two friends had caught the Rap bug early on and that bug translated into collecting records. Walter D followed the route of many young DJs of the time and got his start at Super Skate.
Considering the fact that Rap was still mostly a youth culture, Super Skate served as the club for the teens. Rap contests were held there. Concerts were held there. It was the youth equivalent of Houston’s popular Rhinestone Wrangler (Texas, I tell you).
Rainbow Rolling Rink needed to do something to one up their competition and found that weapon in the form of their DJs best friend, Sir Pace.
Sir Pace was known as a rapper. He rapped while working at McDonald’s. He rapped at school. Pace used to even rap with and against one of the original artists of the Geto Boys, Thelton Polk bka K-Nine. To be truthful, Houston’s Rap scene could easily be summed up with Six Degrees of Sir Pace. But it was his rapping at school that would propel him into our story.
A teacher recognized his talent and suggested that he become a disc jockey. Pace didn’t know what that entailed but the teacher was close to Pam Collins who ran KTSU which was a college radio station that trained young people in the art of working the studio as a disc jockey. The program was called Kidz Jamm. So it wasn’t just a suggestion. It was a possibility.
Pace took that suggestion and starting DJing in the 10am to 2pm Saturday timeslot. Although the original format was R&B, Sir Pace began easing Rap records into his playlist, which, much to the chagrin of Collins, became the prevailing format.
Seeing how the radio show could help with promotion, Rainbow Rolling Rink recruited Sir Pace. Slowly but surely, the crowd started slipping out of Super Skate and sliding into Rainbow. Who could beat the promotion? The radio show and Rink were a perfect One-Two combo, with radio being the jab and the cross being the Rink.
This was the early 80s and the influence of Rap would grow over the next few decades. The people who came later, from DJ Screw to Travis Scott, can trace their origins here.
Now let’s head up in the country. 12 hours North. Let’s head to St. Louis.
I could be mistaken, but I do believe that Country Grammer was recorded in a building that once stood where this nice bit of greenness is now.
A pattern is occurring here…do you see it? I’ll point out another pattern in a bit.
For now, a Eulogy: Here stood Saints Family Roller Rink, a place to skate, dance, rap, and even record music. Saints was known to have all-night sleepover skate parties, a little something to keep the kids out of trouble…but now it’s gone. Rest in peace. Public officials can’t harass your owners anymore.
Unlike Gold Coast Roller Rink, there aren’t dozens of articles bemoaning the fact that we live in a world that demolishes our memories. There are no pictures online. None of that for Saints Family Roller Rink. Just a sad Facebook fanpage with almost 5,ooo followers.
No one’s posted on that page in a year.
The reason that people know of Saints at all is because of Mr. Certified Diamond himself, Nelly, the man who put St. Louis on the map a little over 17 years ago.
Saints was described like this:
If you were a St. Louisan devoted to hip-hop back in the early ’90s, chances are, you knew about Saints. Picture a miniature Brill Building populated by young hopefuls, hustlers and speculators. DJs spun rap records while hundreds of African-American teenagers whirled around the rink or danced in one of the adjoining party rooms. Rene Spencer Saller
The fact that people were still roller skating in the early 90s is a testament to how the past time endured in our culture but Saller could have dug a little deeper and mentioned the fact that Saints had been a hotbed for Hip-Hop dating back to the mid 80s.
This above, green, fuzzy video was thankfully uploaded on YouTube. Not only was it uploaded, they did their due diligence and labeled it. Part 1 of the video actually has the date stamp — Aug. 18 1984. From that I can immediately deduce that this “break dance” contest was set up on the momentum caused by Breakin’ and Beat Street.
Those two movies and the media coverage around B-Boying, we covered here, but suffice it to say, the culture of Hip-Hop spread across America and the world after those releases and people were Rapping, DJing, Breaking, and unfortunately for many city officials, doing Graf.
But the people who lived in the Gateway City had been listening to Recorded Rap from Day One. We go into how “Rapper’s Delight” was heard in East Saint Louis/Saint Louis in “The Infiltration of Black Rap and the impact it had. Well, one of the people impacted by that song was a 19 year old DJ. His name is DJ G-Wiz.
G-Wiz began playing out in Saints and as more Rap came out he learned how to cop it:
I started digging, looking for music like that. I used to get my records down at Skip’s. It was a distributor’s shop, and he was letting me go through records, the stuff that he’d get and put in a stack over in the corner. I’d find stuff like Harlem World Crew, Funky Four Plus One, stuff like that. This album by Grandmaster Flash, Fusion Beats — I’d find stuff like that, ’cause they had cool names. DJ G Wiz
Despite the fact that it would be twenty years before most people were exposed to the scene taking place in St. Louis, here we can see that the seeds were planted long before that and the ground they were planted in was Saints Family Skating Rink.
Like I said, we couldn’t leave the block. There would be no catching of multiple buses to go roller skating. Who was gonna pay for that bus ride? Who was gonna pay for the skate rentals? Not my mom. Nope….
…but I bet she would have been a little more lenient if the Roller Rink that was five blocks away had of stayed open.
That Rink was Park Hill Skating Spa and it was where everyone from Five Points to Curtis Park would skate. Like I mentioned here, Denver was no different than most cities. People stayed in their neighborhoods. Park Hill people didn’t just stroll through Five Points and vice versa. All that was put aside for rolling skating though.
Because of that, DJing at the Skate Spa was THE SHIT. And that’s where my mentor, Brother Jeff Fard, then known as Mr. Magic, got his break.
Initially, Brother Jeff DJ’d house parties, spinning the Soul and Funk classics one record at a time. That’s where he started to make his name. But it wasn’t until he got a chance to spin at the Skate Spa that things really took off.
Brother Jeff was a Skate Guard at the popular Park Hill rink when he got the opportunity to play. Seizing the opportunity, he took the reigns of the DJ position and never let it go. Brother Jeff had been bitten by the Recorded Rap bug around this time like many of the youth in the early 80s but was only able to slip a Rap record in every now and then — it was a mixed audience and the adults ain’t play that.
Having built his reputation at the Skate Spa, when Brother Jeff was able to play whatever he wanted, he hit the youth with Rap. Like DJ G Wiz, Brother Jeff sought the latest Rap Records out, joining a record pool, in his case Londana Dancing Discs of Denver Record Pool, to assure that he was up on the latest releases.
Trev Rich, who recently signed with Cash Money and released his Major Label debut, To Make a Long Story Short, like we talked about here is a part of a large crop of Denver Rappers like none I ever seen before. This crop, if they stick together, have the potential to put Denver on the map the way that Nelly and the St. Lunatics did St. Louis.
But like many people of their generation, they have no idea about their city’s history. I seriously doubt that they know that the man that people call “The Mayor of Five Points,” the man that everyone reaches out to when they need an advocate for justice, the former First Lieutenant of Mosque #51, was the man that made it possible for them to Rap and claim whatever neighborhood their claiming.
All they have to do is ask around though. Inquire about Mr. Magic (named for the Grover Washington Jr. song…if you know the breaks…you know the song), and they would get educated on the history of Rap in Denver. Google won’t have anything — there are zero mentions of the Park Hill Skating Spa there — and I have yet to see a picture of it. This is why I write.
Now, on to the West Coast.
Generally speaking, I hate Biopics. They’re just not done well. Their timelines are off. The hair is usually bad. And they must not pay the Costume Design person — they always get that the clothes wrong. But Straight Outta Compton wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t great. But it wasn’t bad.
But what it did do is make the LA and New York Times do some digging and they both came out with some useful information on Skateland, the Skating Rink that N.W.A. first performed at. And, like the Rinks mentioned above, it was where Rap acts came to perform.
Unlike the other Rinks, the activities at Skateland are pretty well-documented. You can go online and see photos of posters and fliers and site after site of people recalling their own personal history there. Because of that, we won’t go deep into it but we will tie it in with the rest of our story.
I will say this for the record though, and I’m going to write something separate— although people date L.A. Hip-Hop culture as starting in the mid 80s, I totally disagree. I think that the definition of Hip-Hop needs to be changed all together. So to assume that Skateland, which opened in 84, was people’s first exposure to the culture, in this writer’s opinion, is totally erroneous. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s proceed.
Skateland started out with a soon to be who’s who of L.A. Rap. Their DJs consisted of two DJs who would form N.W.A. DJ Yella and Dr. Dre. Dre was already popular for his work with the World Class Wreckin Cru but not as large as he would be in the next four years.
In order to pay the bills, Skateland owner Craig Schweisinger began booking local Rap acts like Rodney O & Joe Cooley, Mixmaster Spade and Toddy Tee, and the greatest of them all, the pioneers, Uncle Jamm’s Army.
If you’re unfamiliar with those names, here’s a little context. Up until me and my older brother, Ade, went to New Jersey in 1984, the only thing that anyone listened to in Denver was New York Rap. If they were from some other place, it was only by chance that we heard it. After our stay in Jersey and Germany, when we returned to Denver, it was all about Toddy Tee’s “Batterram.” Shortly thereafter, Rodney O & Joe Cooley joined the rotation.
People had begun to shift their alliances towards the West…and that’s most of the cities West of the Mississippi. L.A. finding it’s own sound became liberating.
Having those acts perform at Skateland was almost like a coup. There had been other Rinks but this catapulted Schweisinger’s above all of them. Recognizing the demand for Rap performances, the profits from those shows were used to bring in East Coast acts.
This quote from the NYT article is a perfect illustration of those times:
The biggest show in Skateland history was Jan. 2, 1987. Eric B. and Rakim had one single to their name — “Eric B. Is President” backed with “My Melody” — but the Long Island duo was already revered on both coasts. Skateland’s official maximum capacity was 1,720. That night, it let in 3,000 and had to turn the rest away. Sam Sweet
This is what ties Skateland’s story with the ones above. The Rink acted as a Club, a Concert Hall, as well as an incubator for local talent. If you were coming of age in that era, it was your first exposure to Rap. If you were a little older, and from another neighborhood, your first exposure to Rap was World on Wheels which opened in 1981. Uncle Jamm remembers it like this:
We were doing Skateland more than anything . I brought EPMD out here. Queen Latifah. I had Biz there when “The Vapors” first broke. So we were doing Skateland. There were only a couple of places you could (do) stuff at. Skateland, World on Wheels, We did UTFO there (World on Wheels). Every rap show that came in LA, I was a part of. Every rap show. I had been around them. I knew how to hold the crowds, control the crowds, the marketing of them and the security… Uncle Jamm
Now both Skateland and World on Wheels are closed. Skateland was only around for four years. An amazing four years, but four years nonetheless. World on Wheels survived well beyond the deadly 80s, made it through the 90s, and finally closed in 2013.
Los Angeles is now neck and neck with Atlanta with the most influential music scene…but we already talked about that.
Rap is big business now.
If you’re a well-known artist, you’ll pack arenas. You’ll perform in front of at least 18,000 people. If you’re a local artist, you’ll be lucky to pack a 500 person venue.
There’s so many damn Rappers.
In the early days of Rap to make it to a point where you were performing in front of a crowd you had already swam with the sharks and proved yourself to be one of the best.
You…
…battled the people on your block, in your neighborhood — after you became champion there — you took on other neighborhoods, you either saved up money or got someone who believed in you to invest in your studio time, you fought to get that song played, you proved that there was demand for your work…
…THEN you went before an audience.
If you were performing at a Rink in those days, that showed that you were on your way. If you DJ’d in a Rink in those days, you were one of the best DJs in your city. It was supply meeting demand. But it’s different now.
Now acts have to be heavily promoted to even make a dent in the noise of so many different forms of entertainment. Corporations like Live Nation are the top promoters and even tiny 700 seat venues are controlled by them.
Violence was the cause of most of the above Rinks closing…violence that was happening simultaneously all over America because of the death trade of Crack. This trade not only killed many people, it destroyed the Black ecosystem of business that produced what people now call Hip-Hop.
Black people once controlled the product of Rap from creation, distribution, all the way to promotion. But as Rap grew and morphed into a multi-billion dollar a year business, that control slowly slipped into the hands of corporations.
Coincidence? I don’t know. You can answer that for yourself. This was just another look at how Rap grew. It was once performed in small clubhouses, then parks. Parks gave way to hole-in-the wall clubs and when those clubs couldn’t hold the crowds, the next step up was the Roller Rinks, a natural progression since that’s where the audience already was. And it was a great moment in time.
If you have memories of how your local Skating Rink and Hip-Hop intersected, drop us a line in the comments.
