Portland’s Oaks Park marks 119 years with roller rink celebration

Oaks Park’s roller rink has spent more than a century doing what few skating spaces still can: turning a night on wheels into a piece of living history. The Portland rink, which opened on June 23, 1906, sits in the Sellwood neighborhood near the Willamette River and still anchors family outings with the same old-floor charm that has made it the oldest roller rink in the country.

That longevity was the point of the 120th anniversary celebration on June 20, when the rink staged an open skate from 7 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. The birthday night included free cake, party hats, a live DJ, classic skate games and photos with the Oaks Park mascot, a package built to keep the rink’s old-school identity active rather than archival. Special guests from the Royal Rosarians also introduced the new rink entryway mural from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m.

The mural, designed by local artist Nick Lee, was funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Arts Access Fund. That addition tied the anniversary directly to Portland’s arts scene, while the rink itself kept leaning on the details that make it unusual even by landmark standards: a 100-by-200-foot Wisconsin rotunda maple wood floor and a 1926 Wurlitzer pipe organ that was originally built for Portland’s Broadway Theater and moved to the rink in 1955.

Oaks Park says the rink is the last in the world to feature a live pipe organist during select skating sessions, one more reason the place feels less like a relic than a working performance space. Its survival has not been simple. The rink was built in a floodplain and has flooded multiple times, a reminder that the building’s century-plus run has outlasted more than one environmental threat.

The anniversary weekend also folded into a crowded late-June calendar. On June 21 and 22, the Pacific Northwest Regional Artistic Roller Skating Championships took over the rink, canceling open-skate sessions while spectators were welcome to watch. The next day brought a Father’s Day promotion in which dads received a free Ride Wristband with the purchase of a child’s wristband, a deal that applied to all wristband varieties, including rides plus skating, and was available only at the ticket booth.

With the rink celebrating 120 years and the park’s carousel marking 100 years on the midway this season, Oaks Park is using 2026 to underline a simple message: roller-skating culture still thrives when a rink stays active, family-centered and just strange enough to feel irreplaceable.