WEDNESDAY SERVICE
WEDNESDAY SERVICE
Joy, community, and culture have always lived at the roller rink. For New York City, the birthplace of the rollerskate and the home of roller disco, that truth runs deeper than anywhere else. The Roxy, Empire Rollerdrome, Skate Key: these were not just places to skate. They were places where identity was built, culture was passed down, and love was found.
In 2007, Empire Roller Disco closed its doors after 66 years, leaving New York City's skaters with a choice: travel over an hour to Long Island or Newark, or give up rink skating altogether. It is a story playing out across the country. Roller rinks established in predominantly Black neighborhoods, once anchors of intergenerational joy, style, and community, are slowly disappearing, taking with them a living archive of Black social life in America.
In 2024, Xanadu Roller Arts opened in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the first and only roller skating rink in New York City in almost 20 years. Its arrival raises two urgent questions: how did a city that helped pioneer this world go so long without one, and how did its people keep it alive in the absence of a rink?
Wednesday Service sets out to answer that, not only in New York, but in communities across the country where roller skating still provides a home for those building connection through skill and culture. Through environmental portraiture and intimate detail, this project gives faces to the people keeping this world alive in 2026: the elders who carry the history on their wheels, the younger skaters inheriting it, and the rinks themselves as sacred, endangered spaces. Together, they form a portrait of a community refusing to be forgotten.
At its core, this is a project about preservation. I do not want this world to live only in memory. I want to make evidence that love can still be found at the rink.
