Roller World. It was going to be huge. Compared to our old place, it was slated to be a monster. Of course...it wasn't built yet.
It was to occupy a structure that was originally built as an indoor tennis club. 'Courtside' I believe was the name but I could be wrong. My first look in the door was a shock. The thing was gigantic. It was a clear-span steel building with room for 4 tennis courts. It had locker rooms, sauna, a lounge and pro shop in an addition on one end. I was suitably impressed. The outside shell is actually still there if anyone wants to see it but it's now a shopping/office building.
The ceiling was about 40 feet in the air at the peak and hung with noisy, glaring mercury-vapor lighting. Even though it had some kind of padding on the walls, it still echoed like a dry well. The acoustics would take on more significance later.
There was a couple of other things as well that we didn't notice right away that became somewhat larger issues down the road...like the small fact that the steel roof and beams created their own weather. It actually rained indoors at times depending on the humidity. Not a big deal I guess if you're playing tennis but it matters a lot when you try to skate on a wet floor. It also didn't have air conditioning...at all. It was a screamer in there in the summertime and no amount of opening doors and running fans mattered one thin damn. Likewise, the heating system was built to take the chill off...not to actually heat the big barn. If you tried to warm it up enough to take the frost off the floor in winter, it pretty much ate up the fuel bill for the month in a couple of days. Turning on the heat was a very big deal to the owners and they only allowed it sparingly, hoping that enough warm bodies would come in the door so you at least couldn't see your breath.
It also came equipped with the green all-season carpet in the playing area. That carpet was to become my enemy in short order. Since the owners were basically broke and doing everything on the cheap, they never pulled up the old flooring. Too expensive and too much labor. Instead, they had us rink-rats cutting it out in strips wherever there was going to be a block partition that needed to anchor to the concrete pad underneath. And there were a lot of partitions. The wall around the floor was 600 feet long by itself. There would be more walls for the snack bar, skate concession, ticket counter, office space, restrooms, a workshop and oh yes...the whole perimeter of the building got a concrete block interior liner. There was miles of it.
The construction guys would lay out the cuts and we would start in with utility knives and scrapers. That soon turned into crowbars, chisels and electric jackhammers because the stuff was glued down for all eternity. We worked for weeks getting that crap peeled off. The masons were breathing down our neck all the time to stay ahead of them. Our knees wore out and my hands bled more than once before it was done. I thought I'd left that kind of work on the farm...nope.
The block and brick guys were relentless. Soon there were partition walls and doors all over the place. The snack bar area border was a low brick divider and was supposed to have Bluestone cap to finish it off. Trouble was, nobody could afford to ship the stuff from Pennsylvania. My boss allowed as how I might be able to haul it with my pickup and a trailer as a favor. Who knew what 2 inch stone blocks might weigh?
Being an idiot and young, the challenge was accepted and off I went with a U-Haul trailer behind a half-ton '74 Dodge. The rental place guys would probably have had apoplexy if they had known what I was planning to put on their trailer, to say nothing of the bumper mounted trailer ball that had to hold it all. The yard men at the quarry looked pretty skeptical at the prospect of actually moving the amount on the order with what I had but they loaded me up with all of it and I headed for home. I'll never know how many tons overweight I was but with squishy tires and a very, very hot 318, I made it back. My automatic transmission was never the same and died a slow, painful death after that little misadventure. They paid for my gas but the tranny was a loss I had to eat out of my skate guard money.
Then one day, a new crew showed up with deep south accents and nail guns. Soon after them arrived flatbed trailers loaded with pallet after pallet after bundle of wood. A whole lumber yard parked in the driveway and started unloading. The floor had arrived. 20,000 square feet of Hardrock Maple over a double layer of interwoven 3/4 inch plywood for the main skating surface. Another few thousand for the smaller secondary floor that was supposed to be the dance club. (more on that later too)
At least on this, the owners didn't cheap out. The main floor was 100 X 200 feet of floating surface in a fan pattern that took about a week to put down. The installers walked and crawled and pounded and nailed all day and into the night under those awful merc-vapor lamps till it was done. Then another crew came in and sanded it for days. Finally, it all got a couple coats of urethane over the perfect red figure lines and circles. It was gorgeous.
I might have been the first one to roll on that floor. It was so smooth it didn't even feel like I was touching the ground. The hours spent getting ready seemed worth it.
Meanwhile, things got nearer to opening night. Snack bar equipment came in, the restroom plumbing finally worked, the wooden interior doors were all varnished and hung, carpet went up on the walls (significantly, not on the floor), rental skate shelves got built. A thousand things to get ready. It was interesting that the money ran out before there was any attempt to carpet the off-skate areas. From the first day to the last, we had green tennis court flooring complete with lines everywhere there wasn't wood. There was almost no special lighting so we opened under those same vapor lights that took 5 minutes to warm up after you hit the switch. I think the meter actually whined like a jet when you turned those things on. They only turned on enough of them to see by so the money didn't hemorrhage quite so fast to NYSEG.
The new world was a weird combination of cheap and top shelf. The counters were just plywood with carpet stuck on them. Changing benches the same. The snack bar tables and seating was used stuff from a fast-food joint that replaced them with new. The sound system came from the old place when we shut down to make the move and was vastly, awfully insufficient for a room 3 times the size it was designed for. Even with added speakers, it was pathetic. Remember those acoustics? The skate wheels could drown out the music on a good night.
On the other hand, the floor was top notch. The walls were built to hold up till Armageddon and the restrooms could be cleaned with a fire hose if necessary. And it was BIG!
There was room for all the rentals, a separate shop to work on them, office space, a real ticket booth, two DJ booths, a snack bar that you could actually work in, lockers by the hundreds and so much skate floor you could get lost on it. We thought we were really big time because we had turnstiles at the entrances.
We made the move over a few days. I hauled hundreds of pairs of rental skates in cardboard boxes on the flatbed of that same exhausted Dodge pickup. On one trip, I lost some off the back going down Judd Falls Road and for a few minutes, there was a chaos of runaway roller skates zooming down the road, a pack of kids in hot pursuit and confused drivers probably wondering just what the hell they were looking at. It took quite a while to round up all the strays and pair them up again.
But at last, Roller World opened. I don't actually have a clear memory of opening night. I know it was packed but there were so many nights to follow, they all kind of ran together. There was so much story ahead.
It was the end of Skate City though and I never saw the inside of it again before they finally tore it down years later to make room for a drug store. I was sad to see it go especially because by then, Roller World was gone too in an assortment of awful decisions, bad press, poor management and more shady financial and personal issues among the operators than I care to ever know about.
But the adventure was still more ahead than behind when we opened up on Triphammer Road that first night. I hadn't yet met the hundreds of people who influenced how I skate even still. I hadn't seen the rinks I'd go to from Orlando to Ottawa.
Roller World was another door and you know the Wizard was going through it.
