Roller Skating Coming to Red Arrow Park

Red Arrow Park. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Despite much legislative deliberation and even a failed veto override vote, roller skating will in fact come to Red Arrow Park this summer.

A series of roller skate nights called Summer Spinz are being programmed for the rink in Red Arrow Park by Roll Train MKE and Milwaukee Downtown BID #21. They will be held every third Friday in June, July and August from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., according to the BID.

Each night there will be free roller skating lessons from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., and a family skating hour from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. And the official DJ of the Milwaukee Bucks, DJ Shawna has committed to playing the events.

“Summer in the city will be bustling as Downtown Milwaukee prepares to host a multitude of festivals, concerts and events,” said Beth Weirick, CEO of Milwaukee Downtown. “With new offerings each week, our hope is that families, friends, downtown employees and neighbors make Downtown their go-to meeting place this summer.”

But the Summer Spinz series aren’t the only times that Red Arrow will be open for roller skating. James Tarantino, deputy parks director, told Urban Milwaukee the department plans to open the rink for public roller skating access. In fact, the rink would have opened by now, but the department has held off because of the recent poor weather.

The concrete pad used for the Parks annual “Slice of Ice” roller skating events will be repurposed as a roller rink. In the past, Parks had expressed reservations about the damage summer roller skating might do to the ice rink, potentially affecting the ability to create an ice sheet in the winter. The other concern was that short-staffing at the parks department would make it more difficult to regularly clean the surface of the rink so that it’s ready for winter. The ice rink coils that allow for that ice sheet reportedly sit just below the surface of the concrete.

Tarantino told Urban Milwaukee that structural concerns remain, but the department is moving forward.

In 2022, there was a public campaign and efforts by supervisors on the Milwaukee County Board to bring roller skating to Red Arrow Park. Terrance Clarke and Ellen Fine of Roll Train MKE have been advocating for roller skating at the rink for years. Clarke previously told Urban Milwaukee that there are no roller skating areas Downtown, and the rink would offer a safe, healthy activity for the area that does not involve alcohol — as so many Milwaukee events do. The idea enjoyed significant support from the Milwaukee roller skating community and beyond, which was expressed at public meetings considering the proposal.

In July, the county board passed a resolution that would have pulled $175,000 from the county’s rainy-day account to fund a roller skating program at the park. At the time, parks was considering having a protective skating platform installed over the rink. Tha legislation was vetoed by County Executive David Crowley, who said he liked the idea of a roller skating program, but said with only one month left in the summer, the timeline was unrealistic. Additionally, he did not support using the rainy-day fund. “As you know, Milwaukee County operates in a long-term structural deficit,” he noted, and “each time we propose new projects and programs without a sustainable funding source in place, we place the burden of covering those costs on our departments who are already having to do more with less.”

Crowley encouraged supervisors to pursue the project in the 2023 budget, and Tarantino told Urban Milwaukee in August of 2022 that the department was already having discussions with Milwaukee Downtown about roller-skating programs for the following summer in Red Arrow Park.