A roller rink is on its way in St. Augustine. | Susan Weber, Unsplash
Published on March 6, 2025 at 12:01 pm
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Local skaters won’t have to go all the way up to Jacksonville once a roller rink planned in St. Augustine opens later this year.
With a unanimous approval from the city’s Planning and Zoning Board earlier this week, the Ponce de le Rollin roller rink is one step closer to opening its doors on Anastasia Island.
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The project is the brainchild of St. Augustine’s Melissa Gangemi and her family. Gangemi and her husband are in the real estate business, and while she says she’s never owned a roller rink, she does take her kids up to Jacksonville to skate.
“We saw a building up for sale and thought it would be a cool spot for a small, neighborhood hangout rink,” Gangemi told Jacksonville Today.
The building is the former home of Bizarre Bazaar at 201 Anastasia Blvd.
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Once it’s completed and open — Gangemi says she’s hoping for sometime this summer — visitors might be able to expect something straight out of the 1980s.
“We want to do birthday parties, summer camps, theme nights, adult nights,” Gangemi said. “Inside, we’re still working on that. We want it to be kind of retro.”
She’s even open to the idea of seeing whether the rink could accommodate roller derby.
Getting things rolling
Meetings of the St. Augustine Planning and Zoning Board are typically mundane. The hourslong meetings get into the nitty gritty of the city’s development regulations and what can be built where. But during the meeting this week with the roller rink on the agenda, a group of local skaters rolled to the meeting to express their support for the project.
One of those speakers was Carrie Morgan, who says she’s looking forward to the opportunity to skate.
“In these divisive times, roller skating promotes unity,” Morgan said to the city’s Planning and Zoning Board. “It gets people off their phones and out of their heads. Roller rinks are places to make friends, challenge yourself and have a whole lot of fun.”
A handful of nearby residents expressed concern about spillover parking from the roller rink ending up in their neighborhoods, but Gangemi says she believes partnerships with neighboring local businesses will make up for the lack of parking available on site.
Now that she has the approval of the Planning and Zoning Board, Gangemi is inching closer to being able to start work on the rink inside of the roughly 7,500-square-foot space. The next step is for an approval from the St. Augustine City Commission, and then Gangemi looks forward to hitting the ground rolling.
