Rockford on Eight Wheels: A Short History of the City’s Roller-Skating Rinks

Before roller skating became birthday-party entertainment, it was one of Rockford’s great social rituals. The city once had large skating palaces where teenagers dressed carefully, listened to live organ music, drank cherry Cokes afterward, competed in races and dances, and discovered who was willing to skate with whom when the lights went down.

The Ing

Rockford’s association with roller skating reaches back at least to Harlem Park, the amusement park that operated along the Rock River from 1891 until 1928. Among its roller coaster, carousel, dance pavilion, swimming pool and other attractions was a roller-skating palace. Very little appears to survive about the rink itself, but its presence shows that Rockford was already participating in America’s first great roller-skating craze before automobiles had taken over the city.

The most storied Rockford rink was the Ing Skating Palace at 115 North Second Street. The building began life in 1918 as the Inglaterra Dance Hall and became the Inglaterra Ballroom in 1935. In 1939 it was converted into the Ing Skating Palace, beginning a remarkably long run as one of the city’s gathering places.

The Ing was not merely a big empty room where people went around in circles. It had a maple floor, an Art Deco interior and balconies that reportedly gave it something of the appearance of a theater. At one time the building contained two skating floors: the large main rink and a smaller rink toward the rear. The smaller floor was later converted into a dance area with strobe lights.

In the 1940s, around 150 teenagers reportedly skated regularly at the Ing. They came from 7 to 10 p.m., knew one another and often finished the night at a soda bar with Green Rivers or cherry Cokes. It is difficult to imagine a more perfect surviving picture of teenage Rockford before television, shopping malls and phones became the principal forms of recreation.

Skating also involved more ceremony than most people would expect today. David Machek, who purchased the Ing in 1960, remembered boys arriving in black pants, white shirts and ties while girls wore dresses. An organist supplied the music, and the rink hosted both skating and dance competitions. Machek also discovered old photographs of the building’s marquee advertising Lawrence Welk and Jimmy Dorsey, reminders of its earlier ballroom life.

The Ing became less active during the late twentieth century. From 1987 through 1993 it was used primarily for private functions. Charles Rankin purchased it from David and Katherine Machek in 1993 and reopened it for weekend skating, although its busiest decades were behind it. The building survived into the 2000s but eventually deteriorated beyond repair. Today the rink is gone and the property is a parking lot.

Another rink remembered by longtime residents was the Johnson Roller Rink, reportedly built around 1946 at 1823 Cleveland Avenue. Its history is harder to document online than the Ing’s, and even its name sometimes appears as Johnson Rink or Rockford Lane Roller Rink in personal recollections. That uncertainty is part of the problem with recovering the history of everyday places: people rarely preserve the buildings where ordinary happiness happened. By the time historians become interested, the programs, photographs and admission tickets have often disappeared.

The roller rink nevertheless remained an important part of Rockford adolescence. It was a place children could occupy independently but under loose adult supervision—a temporary world of loud music, dim lights, rental skates, snack counters and continuous motion. Nearly everyone experienced the same hierarchy. Good skaters moved through the crowd as if gravity had made a special exception for them. Everyone else hugged the rail, fell publicly or tried to look casual while waiting for the next couples skate.

Two Rockford rinks continue that tradition. SkateCo operates at 3209 North Main Street with a 75-by-180-foot skating floor. Skateland operates at 4843 Stenstrom Road. Phil and Susie Smalley, who came to the Rockford area in 1992 and operated Skateland for 33 years, announced their retirement and the rink’s sale to a new family in late 2025. The business remained a skating rink—a reassuringly rare case in which a Rockford institution changed hands without immediately becoming a parking lot, warehouse or dollar store.

Roller rinks endure because they provide something increasingly difficult to find: public life without much purpose beyond being together. Skating takes just enough concentration to keep people in the moment, but not so much that they cannot talk, flirt, show off, listen to music or laugh when somebody falls. The building may be plain from the outside, but inside it becomes its own small illuminated city.

Rockford has lost the Ing, the Johnson and the skating palace at Harlem Park. Their maple floors, music and crowds have mostly passed into private memory. But the basic ritual survives at SkateCo and Skateland. The wheels have changed, the music has changed and nobody is required to wear a tie, but Rockford is still going around in circles—and, in this particular case, that is something worth preserving.