When Wheels Fun Park in east Durham closed in 2020, its neighbors believed that they had lost their beloved roller rink.
“We thought they were going to tear it down and build some condos,” said Sharon Mitchell, who was a regular at Wheels and lives down the street from the rink. “But then I heard they were opening it up; I got excited about it.”
Durham will celebrate the reopening of the Wheels Roller Skating Rink at Merrick-Moore Park with a grand opening party on Thursday.
Mitchell, who is in her late 50s, has been skating ever since she was 7 years old. In April of last year, she was among dozens of local residents who attended a skate party at Durham Central Park hosted by the city of Durham to help local artist Dare Coulter build a public art piece for the reopening of Wheels.
“You see all the kids who showed up?” Mitchell said, gesturing to the children skating at the park pavilion. “They don’t have anywhere to skate. All those kids would be inside that skating rink.”
Wheels Fun Park, which also contained an indoor playground, mini-golf course, and go-kart track, operated for about four decades. When it closed, it joined one of many roller rinks that have shuttered in North Carolina and across the country due to aging ownership and rising operations costs.
In 2022, the city of Durham purchased it, with the intention of turning it into an aquatics center. But after hearing strong demands from the community, parks and recreation officials announced they were going to reopen the roller rink.
After nearly three years and a few operational delays, the city will reopen the rink to fanfare.
“People I know and love, love this place,” Dare Coulter said. “Typically when rinks close, they don’t return. So (Wheels) is an exception.”
Skating’s importance in Black culture
Cornell Watson
/
For WUNC
Wheels was not the only rink to close during the pandemic. In 2021, Jellybeans in Cary also closed, leaving United Skates of America on Tradwick Road in Raleigh the only remaining rink in the Triangle. United Skates, a commercial operator with about 20 locations across the United States, will also operate Wheels when it reopens.
If one drops into United Skates in Raleigh on one of its Thursday Adult Nights, they’re likely to come across skate instructor Eddie Watson, who teaches classes at the Tarboro Road Community Center in Raleigh. He can usually be spotted in the middle of the rink, doing JB style, a Chicago skating style inspired by James Brown’s music.
Watson said he began skating at the age of 17.
“At that time, hip hop was just emerging, you know, Run-D.M.C., Houdini, mostly the New York rappers,” said Watson, now 57. “That was the best music to skate to.”
He recalled that back then, the Triangle had four rinks, his favorite being a facility called Sportsworld that closed years ago. Roller rinks, he said, have a lot of importance in Black culture.
“In the ’90s, we didn’t have computers, we didn’t have phones like this,” Watson said. “It was good to get together to get away from our parents, away from what they want us to do, and come and do what he wanted to do. And listen to the music for that period of time.”
He also recalled how the rinks would schedule “Soul Nights.” Historically, “Soul Night” at rinks were code for nights when Black skaters were allowed to roll inside.
As noted by the 2018 HBO Documentary “United Skates,” roller rinks have played a major role as vital gathering spaces for Black communities and for launching the careers of legendary hip hop artists, such as Queen Latifah and N.W.A. In civil rights history, Black Americans organized roller skating demonstrations and sit-ins to protest segregated rinks. Famously in 1963, a man named Ledger Smith skated 685 miles from Chicago to Washington, D.C. to hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
North Carolina has lost about half of its skating rinks
But much has changed since Watson laced up his first pair of skates. In the 1990s, North Carolina had around 80 rinks, said Billy Thompson, the owner of Kate’s Skating Rinks in Gastonia and Indian Trail.
“We joke in our industry that skating is the original social network,” Thompson said, “that when you were growing up in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, you didn’t have that cell phone. How do you get ahold of your friends? Well, at school, you say, I’ll meet you at the rink on Friday night.”
He estimates there are now roughly 40 left in the state.
“So, we’ve lost about half,” Thompson said. “It’s a different beast than it was 15 years ago, running rinks. It’s sad because society I think has caused some of the changes in our industry and it’s just the world we live in.”
Kate’s, which was named after Thompson’s grandmother, used to have nine locations. He said there are many reasons a rink could close. The costs of building, operating, and insuring a rink have gone up significantly. Changes in zoning or development projects can also cause a rink to close to make room for a business or entity that would bring more jobs and economic growth to an area. Thompson recalled his grandparents having to close a rink to make way for Charlotte’s light rail system.
Also, many operators of family-owned rinks are aging.
“When you get an owner who’s in their 60s or 70s and has been working six days a week, 12 hours a day and they don’t have any children that want to take the business over. And the real estate mogul comes and says, ‘Hey, I’ll give you X number dollars for your property,'” Thompson said. “Because most people today can’t afford to build a 30,000-square-foot, free-span building on four acres in a metropolitan area. Back in the day, you could.”
Closing a rink can be a painful process, but one that happens due to economic pressures. In 2023, Thompson decided to close a Kate’s location in Lowell, which was fairly close to a larger Kate’s rink in Gastonia. The Lowell rink, which had been around since the late 1970s, had given the community 10 days’ notice that it would close.
“I got cussed out on the phone, I had people threaten my family. We had people come and cry and say we were being greedy. (Others said) your grandparents helped raise me, you are such a staple of the community,” Thompson said. “We had one big final skate on a Sunday afternoon, and we must have had about 700 people there.”
The resurgence of rollerskating
As rinks closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, public interest in skating boomed. Social media skating reels became intensely popular, inspiring many adults, especially young women, who were tired of being cooped up inside. In 2021, the Bruno Mars-Anderson .Paak supergroup Silk Sonic released a chart-topping single, “Skate,” which was accompanied with a nostalgic, ’70s-style roller skating music video that some described as a much-needed reprieve during the pandemic.
Thompson said they sold many skates during that time – even to the point of selling out – and when their rinks reopened after temporary pandemic closures, the attendance exceeded pre-pandemic levels.
“2021’s (attendance) was up 20% from 2019. 2022, up 20% from 2021,” Thompson said. “Our whole industry saw this massive uptick and I don’t know anybody who was down during that time.”
But still, skaters in the Triangle had United Skates as their only rink option. Durham resident Megan Vaughan said that some folks would go to the skate park in downtown Durham, but “it’s a different type of skating” and the type of skating she does requires flat surfaces.
“I’m more of a dance skater, jam skater, as it would be called. So, we kind of started to create our own spaces,” said Vaughan, 33. “At first, I would just find like little empty basketball courts or tennis courts. And then eventually in 2023 is when I started the outdoor meetups at East End Park, because I realized people didn’t always want to travel out to Raleigh but they wanted an outdoor place to skate, you know?”
Before 2020, Vaughan said she skated at Wheels every day, so she’s looking forward to rolling back in the rink. Over the last couple years, she’s supported some beginners through her outdoor meetups and her Instagram account, Bull City Skate Library, which helps connect skaters with local instructors and resources for purchasing skates.
For those who don’t have a lot of rink experience, she has some words of encouragement.
“Just observe how everyone is moving and be willing to jump out there as well,” Vaughan said. “I know it can be a little intimidating, but it’s very fun and you will find that a lot of people are willing to help you.”
