After 54 years, Holiday Skate Center in Orange prepares to close its doors

It started, for Donald Telford, with a school skate party and a sense of fatherly responsibility powerful enough to risk bruising his tailbone.

Read more EPA promised a Make America Healthy Again agenda. It has yet to materialize, frustrating activists

Telford’s daughter, Alyson, was 6 years old. And “she had a terrible time that night.”

“She was being knocked down and run over by sixth graders. I was out there with her. I wasn’t very good either, pretty shaky,” Telford remembers. “So the next Saturday, I brought her to a lesson. She didn’t do very well and wanted to go home. But then she made a friend.”

The next Saturday, “it was ‘Daddy, are we going again?’ And we were here every Saturday after that, without fail.”

It’s been 27 years since fatherly love, maybe concern, first spirited Telford, 72, to Holiday Skate Center in Orange.

Alyson Telford is now a decorated roller skater. And Telford, an ex-accountant, rose through the roller ranks too, from amateur to aficionado to eventually, Holiday Skate owner.

The obsession was contagious. Telford also roped his son and wife into roller skating, and the family often competed in championships and production numbers together.

The traditional hardwood-floor roller rink on Westfield Street in Orange first opened in 1972 around the time of the “Roller Disco” era — pioneered largely by Black and LGBTQ+ communities — as rinks boomed in popularity nationwide.

But Holiday Skate is wrapping up its more-than-50-year run as it gears up to close its doors on Aug. 3, when Telford and staffers will begin clearing out as a zoning change request from the landlords makes its way through City Hall to turn the 1.5-acre site into a townhome community — part of a trend where independent entertainment venues such as bowling alleys and mini-theme parks are transformed into new uses, often housing.

Holiday Skate draws about 1,500 skaters a week, including members of the Holiday Skating Artistic Team and several competitive skaters, Telford said. It’s currently open to the public six days a week and hosts regular themed sessions, including “Flashback” and “Family” nights.

Its upcoming closure will leave Orange County a near-roller rink desert. There’s still Fountain Valley Skating Center. But of the approximate two-dozen traditional roller rinks left in the state, according to the Roller Skating Association International, the other closest for Orange County skaters are in Los Angeles’s Glendale and San Bernardino’s Chino.

Community members recently launched a petition in hopes of saving the rink. Telford has reached out to the Orange City Council, including Mayor Dan Slater, who has said “it’s not the city government’s responsibility to get involved in an owner-tenant lease situation.”

And the landlords “feel it’s time to move on and get the highest and best value for the property for their kids and grandkids,” said Peter Whittingham, a spokesperson for the property owners.

“So, they chose to pursue the entitlements for a project that is frankly most important now, which seems to be what most developers want to build, which is townhomes,” Whittingham said. He expects the zoning change will go before the city’s Planning Commission this fall.

Telford wasn’t blindsided. He said he knew closure was probably in the cards when he bought the business in 2023 from the previous owner, Dennis Collier.

Still, the roller rink’s “a lot of things to a lot of people,” Telford said.

Finding community

Decker and Jones, sprightly siblings ages 6 and 9, zoomed around the roller rink on a recent Tuesday afternoon, too fast for the disco strobe lights to catch them. They didn’t fall, they said proudly, not even once.

It was a familiar scene for grandparents and doting chaperones, Connie, 69, and Greg Rush, 70.

“Our daughter used to come here in junior high, on Friday night when she was a kid,” Connie Rush said, a long-time Orange resident. “We were hoping that they could grow up like their mom. Get dropped off, get picked up, be on their own.”

They hadn’t been back at the center in years, but “we wanted to come here before it closed,” Greg Rush said. “We had a good time.”

Read more Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, fans and friends, celebrate Hollywood Walk of Fame star

Decker rated his afternoon a 100/10 in terms of fun; Jones, a stringent 5/10, because he probably could have skated faster.

Olga Oreshkina, a 38-year-old architect who lives in West Los Angeles, commutes with her 11-year-old daughter most days of the week to Holiday Skate. She’s been a regular for four years.

Skating in Glendale’s rink would spare Oreshkina the hefty drive, she said, but Holiday Skate offered early morning lessons and a sense of community she’s scarcely found since emigrating from Russia 12 years ago, at the outset of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

“Ice skating is big in Russia, but here, it’s not as climate-appropriate,” Oreshkina said, “So I just find that roller skating is a weird mix that gets my identity really well — it’s like figure skating, but on roller skates.”

As she made her way to California those dozen years ago, she imagined sun-drenched skaters grooving along the boardwalk.

She quickly realized, “You can’t really skate outside too much,” and pivoted to practicing indoors.

“But here, I found a community where I feel comfortable, where I can fall and people are going to cheer for me instead of laughing at me,” she said.

Coach Shelby Smith, 35, has trained the Holiday Skating Artistic Team for 12 years, a competition group of about 50 skaters ranging in age from 6 to 70. The team trains and hosts regular exhibitions at the center to show off their routines.

“Over the years, it has had amazing operators that support the kids in the community,” Smith said, teary-eyed at the thought of the pending closure.

She’s hoping the property owners will “at least give us as long as they can.”

“There’s still time in this place,” she said. “I mean, how many more lives could we touch?”

For Smith’s student Madison Albies, 12, Holiday Skate has meant having a home base where she can sharpen her twists and turns with her friends and teammates.

Albies and members of the Holiday Skate Artistic Team are headed to Lincoln, Nebraska, this month, where they’ll compete with teams from all over the country.

Nebraska’s a pitstop in Albies’ long-term plans.

“My goal in skating: I want to become part of Team USA and be able to go to World Skate because the world’s as big as it gets.”

Albies, an Irvine resident, is driven by her mom to practice at the skate center five hours a day, six days a week.

After the rink closes, “we don’t know exactly where we’re going to go,” Albies said, adding the team is considering Fountain Valley Skate, but “we don’t know if they’re going to accept us or if they want an artistic team or if they’re going to have the space to give us the practice time we need.”

The sport’s niche, Albies said, and that makes it frustrating to find practice space, but there are upsides.

“Because our sport is so niche, everyone knows you. It’s like a family. We all always have a great time, all of the kids get along,” she said. “It’s just so tight knit, and just the whole skating community too, it really just feels like a second home.”

Read more Even in blue states, hospitals have continued to drop gender-affirming care for youths