San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Skating’s golden age
How a group of skaters put the brakes on a ban in Golden Gate Park.
The 1979 photo of the Golden Gate Park Skate Patrol tells half of this story all by itself.
Seven figures, dressed in matching tracksuit jackets, roll toward the camera with resolve, looking like the cast of an “Avengers” movie that had passed through Olivia NewtonJohn’s wardrobe and hairandmakeup team from “Xanadu.”
It’s one of the least selfconsciously diverse photos in The Chronicle archive, featuring four women and three men covering multiple demographics; a United Nations delegate meeting on skates.
They formed as a direct response to the threat of a full roller skating ban in San Francisco, and the sense of unfinished business in the photo is clear. The rest of the story they can tell themselves. Because 40 years later, many are still skating in the park whose future they helped shape.
“They weren’t invited to the party, but they crashed it,” said Tom Ammiano, who worked with the roller skaters during his decades as an activist and San Francisco supervisor. “In terms of alternative transportation, they kind of blazed a trail for it.”
The rise of roller skating in Golden Gate Park was fed by a combination of cultural and technological changes.
The polyurethane wheel allowed durable skating outdoors, around the same time that disco music fueled a public dance revival. The “boom box” portable stereo became small and inexpensive enough to carry long distances at around the same time that movies and TV began glorifying the freedom of outdoor skating.
As a result, tens of thousands of roller skaters began flooding the park in the 1970s, seemingly overnight.
The first articles in 1978 were light and positive (“Summer’s Bright Shiny Wheels,” the first Chronicle article was headlined). And while the city wasn’t prepared for the huge crowds congregating on John F. Kennedy Drive in the park, the vibe was fantastic. Former Skate Patrol member Shaun Neal, now 65, remembers the first time he saw roller skaters in the park, and was struck by the racial diversity and general positive vibe. He bought a pair of skates right away.
“I just saw a fun group of people. Everybody got along well,” Neal says. “If there was racism in this city back then, you wouldn’t see it out here. Everybody was cool with each other.”
But as roller skating rental trucks ringed the park, and the volume of skaters began to affect nearby neighborhoods, the media’s tone quickly shifted to a “berserk skater” narrative.
Skate Patrol leader David Miles Jr. remembers a local television news station asking him and his friends to perform tricks near the Music Concourse — then twisting the footage to air a histrionic piece about the dangers of roller skating.
“Everything that you hear now about scooters is what you heard about skating,” says former Skate Patrol member Paul Piancone, a retired San Francisco paramedic. “They used to say, ‘They’re going to run down old ladies and kill them!’ … It’s the same excuse they use for any new mode of transportation.”
Faced with a full ban of skating in the park, the Skate Patrol was formed by assistant Recreation and Parks Superintendent Peter Ashe and the skaters themselves — a loose collection of enthusiasts who cared about the sport and the scene enough to save it. Miles remembers meeting on the second floor of what is now the Ireland’s 32 bar on Geary Boulevard, on July 15, 1979.
The city closed nine areas, mostly near museums, to roller skating, but agreed to keep the rest open on a trial basis. Skate Patrol members were deployed in teams of two to enforce the noskating zones, administer first aid and help keep the peace.
Miles doesn’t remember asking for the job, but he became the de facto leader.
Gathered together in Golden Gate Park on a recent Sunday, the aging skaters — most showing up on eight wheels — shared so many great Skate Patrol stories that an HBO prestige television series seems inevitable.
( Just one example: Miles and other skaters once turned the doubledecker Embarcadero Freeway, closed because of damage from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, into their own personal latenight skate park.)
Some of the best skaters joined the patrol, including James Johnson, the king of Golden Gate Park roller skate jumping, who once cleared a Triumph Spitfire automobile.
There was Skate Patrol member “Jeff,” who was also a male stripper in North Beach, where the roller skates were part of his act. The skaters remember “Old Man Bob,” a retired merchant seaman who lived in a van near the park and skated his appointed rounds with a cane.
“If you don’t lie or steal, you could hang with us,” Miles says. “I find that most people want to do good. You’ve got to give them a chance. The people who were drawn to do Skate Patrol are people who want to help anyway.”
Ronnie Lee was in her teens, bouncing to different group homes in San Francisco, when she joined Skate Patrol. Angry and resentful that she had been moved from the bright Mission District to the foggy Richmond, she found purpose in the group.
“I think it really did change the course of who I became,” Lee says now. “It was really like an extended family. And when you came out here you could be anybody. You could have blue hair, be new to the city, no family, whatever. You were still accepted.”
The first fight was to save roller skating in Golden Gate Park.
When that was done, Miles became a vocal advocate to keep cars out of the park. The Skate Patrol organized events and stunts to raise money for things like walkietalkies for the patrols, and to get attention for their causes. Miles says he once entered City Hall and rolled to Mark Leno’s office on skates, to remind the supervisor to come outside for a ceremonial sendoff as the skaters headed to Los Angeles.
“I just skated right in, walked all the way up the steps and went to his office,” Miles remembers. “When we get
Listen to the podcast Peter Hartlaub interviews original Skate Patrol member David Miles Jr. about skating in San Francisco on the latest episode of The Big Event. www.sfchronicle.com/podcasts
out, we skated backwards down the steps.”
In the late 1980s the skaters successfully lobbied for the Skatin’ Place, a $70,000 transformation at JFK Drive and Sixth Avenue, turning a blockedoff street into a gathering place for roller skaters.
Miles supported ballot measures to ban cars in Golden Gate Park on Saturdays, which led to a 2006 compromise closing most of JFK Drive on Saturdays.
“I would go down to City Hall, (to) every supervisor’s office and say, ‘Hey, how are you doing? We’re the Skate Patrol. We’re trying to do this thing in the park, we need your support,” Miles says. “My philosophy is it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to do it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know these people. I’m a citizen, I pay taxes. They work for us.”
Believing in compromise, Miles said he tried not to make enemies, even with the museum leaders and other wellmonied San Franciscans who were against closing the park to cars. Miles, a former bricklayer who came to San Francisco with no money in the 1970s, says he has been inside socialite Dede Wilsey’s mansion.
(He did not wear skates, but says he gifted the former S.F. Fine Arts Museums president a pair.)
At one point Miles and a group skated for 12 hours from the Bay Area to Sacramento to convince state legislators that city councils shouldn’t have the right to ban skating.
“It’s a very good memory for me, and they were actually able to get something done,” Ammiano says of his contact with the skaters at City Hall. “They were authentic and believeable and City Hall was a labyrinth of bureaucracy.”
Forty years later, the number of roller skaters in Golden Gate Park is much smaller, and the Skate Patrol is a loose organization of friends, with no patrols.
City leaders and the media have moved on to the next thing that’s going to destroy the soul of San Francisco. You can skate from the Conservatory of Flowers to the California Academy of Sciences on Sundays and Saturdays when JFK Drive is closed, and the meanest thing you’ll receive is a friendly wave.
But the Skate Patrol keeps coming to the park.
That part of San Francisco that everyone says is dead? The Skatin’ Place may be the best argument that it’s still hanging on. There’s a little bit of everything, from a guy skating fast with his small white dog to a skater dressed in a samuraiinspired outfit. At 3 p.m. sharp, Miles leads everyone in a roller skating version of the “Thriller” dance.
“It’s the nature of San Francisco to do (this),” Miles says. “It’s the nature of San Francisco to take things like this that are kind of quirky, not the norm, and to make it normal.”
Miles has become the skating godfather of San Francisco, starting the Church of 8 Wheels skating rink on Fillmore Street, organizing events and presiding over the Skatin’ Place.
Former Skate Patroller Paul Piancone says when Miles skipped the Skatin’ Place for a weekend, the scene descended into chaos, with people fighting over the music.
“He’s dedicated his life to this,” Piancone says.
Miles insists that skating will outlive him. He calls roller skating “the second wave of the hippies,” carrying on the positive vibes from the Summer of Love in 1967.
“I think what was happening is, a lot of people running the city wanted to tap into that special energy,” Miles says. “And I think even today when you go out to Golden Gate Park on Sundays, that special energy is still there. It’s like the essence of San Francisco. You can be a part of it, you can feel it, you can almost touch it. It’s so strong.”