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Our home rink is a Fort Lauderdale landmark. Built in 1947, Gold Coast Roller Rink just celebrated its 60th anniversary. The following story is about Gold Coast's long history of serving a diverse clientele.
Diversity's good business
for longtime skating rink
BY ROBERTO SANTIAGO | Originally published in the Miami Herald on October 05, 2007
Walk into Fort Lauderdale's Gold Coast Roller Rink and you'll see an eclectic blend of lifestyles — ladies night, gay skate night, gospel, old school — the kind of diversity that speaks to the many cultures of South Florida.
What's rare about Gold Coast, celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, is that it has always been that way — even in the days when Fort Lauderdale was a fiercely segregationist town where racial mixing was rare, overseen by a bigoted sheriff.
In part, Gold Coast reflected the times: Boys had to wear jacket and tie and girls a dress or long skirt to skate. Music was Frank Sinatra and big band. Admission was a quarter, skate rental was a dime, and a nickel got you a hot dog.
In another way, though, the rink stood out. Anyone was welcome, black or white, gay or straight.
"Gold Coast owners decided — we are going to let anyone in who behaves themselves and wants to skate," said Harold Wieselthier, 70, who became the fourth owner of the rink 25 years ago.
"What color they were or what they did in the privacy of their own home, we didn't care. We didn't wave a flag about what we were doing. We were just trying to make a buck," Wieselthier said.
Diverse before the term was invented, Gold Coast, 2604 S. Federal Highway, is the oldest surviving business in the neighborhood off Miami Road and U.S. 1, with its current neighbors a biker shop and a gay nightclub. It was the first to take advantage of the fresh day after Broward Sheriff Walter Clark left office in 1950, said Helen Landers, historian for the Broward County Historical Commission. "Business owners were able to relax," said Landers, 84.
Soon, blacks could come into Gold Coast, first on their own nights, but increasingly when whites were there.
What happened? Nothing. If anyone objected, they didn't say much.
"Back when there were racial riots going in the 1960s and '70s, you weren't black or white at Gold Coast; you were a skater," said Bishop Tyrone Jones, 52, who heads the Triangle Hope Ministry, a Pentecostal church in Opa-locka. "If you fell, you would be helped up."
The Inside Story
Gay people were widely considered to be criminals then. At Gold Coast, they were family, although management had a clever way of keeping it quiet.
To the outside world, Tuesday nights were a men's-only Bible study night. Inside the rink, said Ed Clapp — who has visited the rink just about every Tuesday night for 45 years — the story was different.
"There were a lot of men, but no one was opening up their Bibles," said Clapp, 75, who said straight guys who stumbled onto the party either stayed — or slinked out.
"Tuesday nights stayed a secret for a long time because straights who left were too embarrassed to tell anyone," Clapp said.
The rink's location near Port Everglades had a lot to do with its open attitudes, said historian Landers, who skated often at Gold Coast in the 1950s.
Visitors from all over the world, many with similar relaxed views, patronized the rink and area taverns, she said.
Not Many Changes
Physically, the place hasn't changed much. It is still dark inside, with lights beaming only from the ceiling and nearby neon signs. The run-down snack bar seems frozen in time, offering the same fare sold decades ago — only now a hot dog costs $2.
The skate surface is a polished, 25,000-square-foot maple floor cushioned underneath with trusses, beams and old-but-solid Dade County pine.
"It is what we call a floating floor — they don't make them like this anymore," said Gold Coast director of operations Miles Miron. "This adds a slight bounce and cushion when skaters do jumps and turns. Today's rink floors are now just maple over concrete."
The DJ booth still overlooks that floor, but the beats it booms out are now hip-hop, dance and pop. Laquita Cole, 24, DJ for Thursday's funk, soul and R&B night, said her role is to keep people skating continuously.
Wieselthier sighs when he recalls having the rink's organ removed in 1992, after the last of the classical skaters stopped coming in.
"They died, or got too old and weak to skate," Wieselthier says. He's wistful about the old days when Thursday nights were filled with seniors doing elaborate dance routines, a tradition young skaters have no interest in continuing.
Staying Power
But the rink still draws almost 3,000 patrons per week, enough to keep it alive for the next generation of children who've fallen in love with skating -- and their parents who remember the good times.
Wieselthier sold Gold Coast in 2002 to Joe Latona, a New Yorker who keeps the tradition alive.
Latona, 37, a former New York auto dealer, said the relaxed, family-friendly, politics-free attitude drew him in after the 9/11 terrorist attacks made him reevaluate his life in New York.
"All I was doing was working long hours. I had an infant and a 1-year-old that I never saw. And it hit me: We need to live our lives while we still have it," said Latona, who some might say looks more the part of heavy metal rock guitarist than roller rink owner.
He gets to see his kids — now 6 and 7 — almost every day. "They are always here with their friends," Latona said.
Karimah Ali, a teacher at the Hanan's Child Care & Development Center in Opa-locka who recently took 17 of her day campers to Gold Coast, said skating offers life lessons for children.
"They come here to teach each other, to help each other to get up if they fall down," Ali says. "They think they are just having fun and exercising, but they are really learning the importance of not giving up and being kind to one another."
Gold Coast's all-welcome philosophy is a winning one for a roller rink, says Joe Champa, president of the Roller Skating Association International in Indianapolis.
"Rinks that survive only care about one color -- green; and letting people in who can give us their dollars," Champa said. "Anything else is just politics and something owners can't be troubled with."
In the Buff
Gold Coast has an event that's one of a kind, Champa confirms: the annual WildFyre Social gay nudist skate night.
"It's 75 to 100 naked men, some as old as 80, wearing nothing but roller skates — going around and around to dance music," said Gold Coast co-manager Penny Shoemaker of the gala, which rolls around again Feb. 11.
Shoemaker tends bar that night — there is a three-drink maximum — and she finds herself saying things she gets to say once a year:
'I say, 'Guys, I know you don't have any pockets, so I'll run y'all a tab.'"
