A group of Bay Area roller skaters is on a mission to build Panther Skate Plaza, an inclusive, community outdoor rink at West Oakland’s DeFremery Park. Every week, dozens of residents attend the group’s Thursday Panther Prowl event.

The project came about when the park’s director Greg McClain approached the group’s founder Kei Kei Kemp in 2021, as reported by the Oaklandside. The group steadily grew over its first year, and the event became an official city of Oakland Parks and Recreation program in 2022, as reported by KGO.

The weekly Thursday Panther Prowl currently takes place from 6 to 9 p.m. on the park’s basketball court. There’s also  a Black Panther Party-inspired farmers market each week, presented by God's Resting Place Community Outreach.

The permanent Panther Skate Plaza will be located between the DeFremery Park’s basketball and skateboard courts. As KPIX reports, the community refers to the park as Bobby Hutton Park, after the first recruit to join the Black Panther Party. According to the group’s website, the park was a community, political, and administrative hub for the Black Panther Party.

As the group’s website notes, there aren’t any indoor rinks within 25 miles of Oakland, and the East Bay has a dearth of outdoor spaces suitable for rollerskating.

“It is not about building tennis courts that look appealing to people that don’t live here yet so that this place can be gentrified,” community member Donna Norcom Milich told the Oaklandside. “It’s about making space for the people that already live here to do the things that they do that are positive to enhance their lives.”

The group’s mission is “to create a safe, inclusive, and accessible space for roller skaters of all identities, ages, and abilities that is organized by the community for the youth, while contributing to the rich history of West Oakland and DeFremery Park.”

"The division that's happening right now, it's not good for anyone. It doesn't matter who we are and what we look like. We just need to really come together and keep doing things like this," skater Rody Jointer told KPIX.

Image: David Meza/ZapInc

COVID-19 has been tough on the roller rink business, and decades-old San Ramon roller rink Golden Skate says it’s hanging up its skates after the year’s end.

There remains a somewhat healthy roller skating scene in San Francisco, with that Sunday roller disco party popping up every weekend in Golden Gate Park. But that’s not the kind of thing you’re going to shlep a van full of nine-year-olds to for a birthday party, and the old-time roller rink many of us grew up with is now nearly extinct. COVID-19 has accelerated that process, making these cavernous facilities either shutter or operate at limited capacity, and KTVU reports that a last-of-the-dying-breed Golden Skate in San Ramon will permanently close sometime around the end of the year.

The announcement actually came in late October. “The enormous financial damages that we suffered due to COVID have made the continued operation of the Golden Skate infeasible and so it is with a great deal of sadness that I must announce that The Golden Skate will cease its operations,” the rink’s owner Dr. Hassan Sharifi said in a letter posted to their website. ”We reopened the rink in May of 2021 and were hopeful that we could regain enough income at a break even or better, but it has become clear that our hope is unrealistic.”

In terms of a specific closing date, the rink’s management has merely said in Facebook comments that “We don’t have a closing date yet. We will still be open throughout the holiday season this year.”

One silver lining, should you be a roller skating enthusiast, is that the Golden Skate is doing 50% off sales on their remaining stock of rental skates.

In terms of the remaining roller rinks in the Bay Area, there are still a couple. The Fillmore’s cult-hit Church of 8 Wheels reopened in the spring, and is still open Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, though it’s a remodeled church, not a proper roller rink. There’s one in Antioch called Paradise Skate, and otherwise San Jose has an Aloha Roller Rink, and Rohnert Park is home to a Cal Skate.  

Related: Video: 'Totally Free' Gives You A Peek Into The Lives Of SF's Roller Skate Community [SFist]

Image: The Golden Skate via Facebook

"We’ve been preparing for reopening ever since they first shut us down," says the "GodFather of Skate," Rev. David Miles. Also known as "The Mayor of Golden Gate Park" for his frequent residency at the park's miniature rollerskating area along JFK Drive, Miles is telling everyone he can that the Church of 8 Wheels is back open as of Friday.

There was a small "preview" skate on Thursday morning, as KRON4 reports, with Miles and about a dozen others taking advantage of SF's first hours of "Yellow" tier reopening. The Reverend was wearing one of his big furry top hats and bedazzled trench coats, spinning around the former church at Fillmore and Oak for the TV cameras.

Miles had tried to get open last fall, when SF was briefly in the "Yellow" tier, but the roller disco didn't make it open before the city slid back into the "Red" and then "Purple" tier as COVID cases surged in November.

He also briefly reopened at 10% capacity in March, hoping that the roller rink could qualify as an indoor gym or fitness center, when SF was still in the "Red" zone again. But the City Attorney's Office shut that down, informing him that rollerskating falls under "Indoor Family Entertainment," which isn't allowed until a county reaches "Yellow" status.

San Francisco finally got there on Tuesday, and today is the day when the rules change once more.

The big change is that bars can now be open at 25% capacity indoors, without food service. Restaurants remain at 50% capacity indoors, but table can be seated up to eight people with no household limit. People can remove their masks when seated at outdoor bars and restaurants (which was mostly already happening), and gyms can open up to 50% capacity, up from 25%. Non-essential offices are also allowed to bring back workers at 50% capacity, but it's impossible to know what segment of SF's workplaces are going to take advantage of that.

The roller disco, meanwhile, gets to be open to 50% capacity, which would be 100 skaters per session. Miles had earlier planned to limit each session to 2 hours, and masks, of course, will be required.

Rev. Miles has been hosting Skatin’ Place in Golden Gate Park for decades, and founded Black Rock Roller Disco at Burning Man, which dates back to 1999. A true SF character, he took up residence at the abandoned Sacred Heart Church at 554 Fillmore Street in 2013, and hosted roller disco parties there several days and nights a week for seven years, until the pandemic shut everything down. Still, he's been out in the park all the time for the past year, and NBC's California Live visited him at the Skatin' Place last month to see the pandemic party that's been ongoing at the rink.

As he prepared for a far more paranoid public to enter the space last fall, Miles installed a new air filtration system at the church, and he tells KRON4 that he has "a whole sanitation system for the skates."

The place, of course, also has a sound system and sophisticated light projections all around, as seen in the video from 2018 below.

The Church of 8 Wheels reopens Friday. Formerly established hours had an all-ages skate session starting at 3 p.m. on Fridays, with 7 p.m. being the beginning of 18+ hours. It's not clear what the new hours will be — but check Facebook for updates.

Retired Muni worker Zigfried 'Ziggy' Stuhl will admit to being a daredevil, and at age 85 he's not done with his stunts. ABC 7 was on hand to capture him flying down California Street from Nob Hill on his rollerblades Thursday — and no, he did not fall. He had to dodge cable cars (as a Muni employee he once helped improve the braking systems on these very cars), and various vehicles and pedestrians. But he made it down in one piece, cautioning that others, even those much younger, shouldn't try this at home.

As the Church of 8 Wheels tells us, Ziggy is "one of the Sunday regulars at the Skatin’ Place in Golden Gate Park," and he also made an appearance at the Church of 8 Wheel's Saturday Roller Disco over the weekend. He apparently hails from the same hometown in Austria as former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Showing ABC 7's Wayne Friedman his technique for stopping himself in case of a fall, Stuhl says, "When I fall down, I can always manage to go down then scrape along."

Says Friedman on Twitter, "Have had stranger assignments, but not many."

Below you can watch Ziggy doing some of his usual rounds at the Skatin' Place in the park.

Photo by davitydave.

It's spreading, in that virus-y way, and we figured you might as well catch it from us. Consider it your afternoon palate cleanser. There must be a few of you who enjoy mineral water, the Sugarhill Gang and CGI-enhanced roller-dancing babies, right?