Constable: Orbit roller-skaters chill inside while it's icy outside
On a snowy Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, drivers behind the wheel are slipping, sliding and trying to avoid running into each other on the side streets. The ones who arrive safely at the iconic Orbit Skate Center in Palatine show much more control on the rink. But some of them do manage to go back in time.
“I came here when I was a kid,” says Noel Pearlman, 43, a Buffalo Grove bank employee who enjoys his day off work with his wife, Alison, as they watch their 10-year-old son, Seth, and 8-year-old daughter, Sloane, zip around the rink. “This place is an institution.”
The 100-by-200-foot hard maple floor is the largest roller-skating rink in the area, says Mark Basich, Orbit's general manager.
Basich, 53, grew up in the Fireside Roll Arena, owned by his parents, Irv and Marge, from 1975 until 1985 in Hoffman Estates. Listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest indoor roller rink, Fireside is where a 17-year-old Basich met his future wife. Now they are divorced and Fireside is a grocery.
Orbit, which opened in 1972, is for sale by owner Sandra Levin, a skater who bought the rink in 1992. Customers worry that Orbit might close as well. But you can't detect any angst in the hundreds of kids, teens and adults skating away a cold, snowy day as they smoothly make counterclockwise circles to the beat of pop music.
“It's amazing exercise,” says Alison Pearlman, a consultant who does some paperwork as her kids skate.
Orbit has a $5 special on the King holiday, but it also hosts after-school programs, birthday parties and private affairs. The environment rekindles memories of the good times Katie Krajecki had growing up in Melrose Park.
“We used to go almost every Friday night to the skating rink. That was our hangout,” Krajecki says. Now the 39-year-old substitute teacher from Bensenville brings her 11-year-old daughter, Izabel, and 9-year-old son, Logan.
“When we come, it's time we can spend with each other,” says Izabel, who joins her equally athletic brother as they gracefully scoot around the rink together.
Their mom notes that her kids often skate around inside their house.
“This is something they can do together instead of playing video games,” she says.
Basich, who used to own the Fireside II roller rink in West Dundee, says roller rinks are about much more than skating.
“It's a social place, just like high school,” Basich says, noting that people of all ages, races, religions and ethnicities come together while skating.
Competitive roller skating is popular in India and with Indian immigrants in the suburbs, Basich says. One of his biggest nights of the year is an overwhelmingly black gathering of 1,100 people from around the nation skating to rhythm and blues music during an all-night event on the Saturday before the Fourth of July. Whatever the crowd, the mood is always upbeat, he says.
It's “just people enjoying people,” Basich says. “It's amazing.”
DJs Henry Bolden, who has been playing skating music for two decades, and Danielle Mendoza, who is 20, play a wide variety of music to keep kids, teens, parents and grandparents in the right mood, Basich says.
But the roller-skating anthem is “Don't Stop the Rock,” a 1980s electro-pop hit by Freestyle, Basich says. That song burns off youthful energy and also warms the parents' hearts during an era with so many options other than roller skating, he says.
“It's hard to compete,” Basich says.
“All we can do is appeal to the parents and get kids off the couch. Winter is good for us.”