Plea for new life echoes from vacant roller rink


		Karen Ducey / P-I
	The Derby Liberation Front and the Sockit Wenches mix it up at the now-closed Southgate Skate Center in White Center. The closure has saddened many.

Years later, the former Marine sometimes known as "Corporal Punishment" returned to coach a team for the Rat City Rollergirls as the wildly popular female roller derby league was getting its start.

So he and others were crushed when a new generation of owners last year decided to close White Center's longtime roller-skating rink and put it up for sale. A fire in a neighboring lot scorched the building last summer but did no permanent damage.

Today, the cavernous building in the heart of White Center's business district sits empty, with the baby-blue floor gathering dust, video games piled in a corner and popcorn still sitting uneaten in the snack-bar machine.

"It really killed me," said Hemphill, 27. "We always talked about if and when we ever had kids we'd want to have them skating by the time they're a year-and-a-half old. We'd want to teach them how to skate the same place that we learned."

Now, a community effort is under way to try to save the skating rink by finding an investor willing to keep it intact, and possibly offering partnerships to make the deal more attractive.

"It's an icon -- people have always known White Center for it," said Jo anne Houk, 61, who remembers begging her mother to buy the perfect skate skirt in high school. She now leases two storefronts in the building.

"I hate to think they're just going to tear it down," she said.

No one has yet offered to buy the 32,000-square-foot building, which includes eight single-occupancy apartments and three retail spaces. It has an asking price of $1.8 million.

The owners would love to see it remain a skating rink, in memory of their parents who ran it for decades. But they're realistic that it might not, said Rita Cook, a broker for Coldwell Banker Commercial handling the sale.

Since 1937, the Southgate Skate Center has been home to budding teenage romances, birthday parties, formal dances and nationally competitive speed-skating teams.

Before that, the slate-blue building shaped like an airplane hangar was a boxing arena and dance hall. It's functioned as a place to trade gossip, child care and leads on jobs.

Right now the internationally diverse White Center, which also has pockets of high poverty, is seeing a resurgence of investment -- from new sidewalks and public art to the redevelopment of a large public housing complex that will be home to 1,100 families.

A national foundation has also helped fund the White Center Community Development Association, which is working on strategies to save the skate center.

Aside from giving the community a unique identity, it's a safe gathering place where kids can exercise, officials say.

One idea -- far from being fleshed out -- might be for the non-profit to buy the apartments. That would both preserve affordable housing and shave something off the skating rink's price, said association board member Dan Carlson, a community development consultant and University of Washington lecturer.

"If you're interested in sustaining vibrant neighborhoods, you want to have a place that combines social activity with economic activity, and a skate rink is one of those building blocks," he said. "You want to create them and not see them wither away."

Francine Tamaccio, who grew up helping her family run the Southgate Skate Center and now shares joint ownership with her brother and cousins, said she'd do anything to help keep it operating.

She's seen it through so many phases -- from the days when dressed-up couples danced to organ music to the disco craze to the country line-dancing fad.

But the other members of her family wanted to sell, she said.

"Basically I am the odd person out. I was the one who devoted my life there," she said. "It's been pretty hard, but the community is behind us."

Two of her daughters skate with the Rat City Rollergirls, who are rabid fans of the White Center rink and would love to practice there again. After holding their first three bouts there last year, they outgrew the space and moved the popular events to a hangar at Magnuson Park.

But they remain heavily invested in the community, picking up litter on a stretch of 16th Avenue Southwest, shopping and eating there and skating for the community development association at charity events.

Founding Rollergirl Brandy Rettig, (aka "Rettig to Rumble") lives three blocks away from the skate center. Since it closed, there's been a noticeable void in the community, she said.

In an old building with crumbling plumbing and a decor suspended in time, there was a genuine family feeling and such a love for skating that cool things happened there, she said.

"It's the place we chose to put our roots down," Rettig said. "We could have been the Emerald City Rollergirls, but we wanted to be part of a community that reflected us -- a little bit edgy, a little bit tough and rough around the edges.

"It was the perfect spot for us, and we're really sad it closed."

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