Roller Skating 2: Boom and Bust Cycles
Roller skating has gone through several boom-and-bust cycles. The first boom lasted from the 1870s into the early 1890s. The Grand Hall Olympia in London, the largest roller rink ever built, with a skating area of 68,000 square feet, opened in 1890 but closed within a year. (It did reopen from 1909 to 1912.) Other large arenas in Europe and North America were soon forced to shut down.
The revival came quickly, starting in the United States right around the beginning of the 20th century. Emblematic of the sport's comeback was the 1902 opening of a public roller rink in Chicago that attracted 7,000 skaters.
Representing the Winslow Roller Skate Company, Chester Park went to Liverpool, England, in 1907. He rented Tournament Hall, installed a floor of maple parquet, and opened it as an American style skating rink. Its success led to the development of similar rinks throughout England and then on the continent. This spell of "roller skating fever," as Park called it, ended when World War I began.
When the war ended and the 1920s began, dance fever took over and many pre-war skating rinks became post-war dance halls. Not all of them, though; roller skating wasn't dead, simply not nearly as popular as it had been. Many roller skating clubs had been organized in England and Europe before the war and a lot of them resumed operating soon after war's end. Also, ice skating was attracting more followers and many ice skaters used roller skating as a means of practicing in the warmer months.
In the United States, roller skaters began to move outdoors during the 1920s, as cities installed paved sidewalks and streets. In 1925, the New York City Recreation Department began holding annual speed roller skating tournaments, with preliminaries in playgrounds throughout the city leading up to the championship races in Central Park. Distances ranged from 100 to 880 yards and there were races for adults as well as youngsters. Each winner received a pair of skates as a prize.
The rapid increase in paved roads to accommodate automobiles also made long-distance outdoor skating possible, with some limitations. When Mrs. Henry Pfetzing and her daughter, Anna, tried to skate the 400 miles from Kansas City, Missouri, to Peoria, Illinois, in 1927, they discovered that only 215 miles could be traversed on skates. For the rest of the distance, they had to trudge along dirt roads, carrying their skates.
The same year, Arthur Allegretti was luckier. On a bet, he skated from Buffalo, New York, to New York City in 58 hours without sleep, fortifying himself with hot dogs and grape soda along the way.
Professional speed skating became fairly popular as a spectator sport during the 1920s. Races were staged in major rinks and arenas. Madison Square Garden held a six-day race for three-man teams, patterned after its famous six-day bicycle races, in 1929. That was the extreme, but marathon racing for professionals and amateurs was also held at other rinks. Walter Miller set a record by skating for 147 hours, with some rest breaks, at the White City Rink in Boise, Idaho, in June of 1935.
Interest in professional racing had pretty well died out by 1930 and amateur racing also began to decline during the 1930s and the Great Depression. During World War II, the manufacture of skates was put on hold, along with other industries not essential to the war effort.
Roller skates made another comeback during the 1950s, thanks largely to the post-war baby boom. After another decline, the sport came back in the late 1970s, mainly because of the roller disco fad. Reportedly, the number of rinks in the United States increased from less than 1,000 in 1970 to somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 in 1980.
But the disco craze died quickly and about half the rinks were forced to shut down between 1980 and 1985. Shortly afterward, in-line skates arrived on the scene. For a time, it seemed as if the "new" type of skate might completely replace the traditiional quad skate, but it didn't happen. In fact, the popularity of in-line skating may have helped to boost quad skating in the long run. While in-line skates are inherently faster, they're not nearly as maneuverable as quad skates. Some athletes, introduced to roller skating through in-line skates, became converts to quad skares because of the manueverability.
One factor was the rise of jam skating, a relic of the disco skating era. Jam skating combines dancing on skates with gymnastics and elements of figure skating. It requires quad skates, because they offer the balance necessary for many of the moves. According to USA Roller Sports, jam skating surpassed skateboarding in popularity early in 2005. There are 11.7 million jam skaters, compared to 11.1 skateboarders, the organization says. In-line skating is still more popular, though, with 19.2 million participants.