For a while there roller skating had a huge impact on Venice but I didn't take that many pictures. The cone slalom didn't protograph very well. When you stopped the motion you usually lost a big dollop of the spark. (That was the same with a lot of the freestyle skateboard too. When home video came along it took off again). Plus it was a Sunday afternoon scene and so it was almost impossible to avoid shooting into the sun with the pavilion as the background. The disco skate scene drew people from all over the West side but not really the local crowd, and for the same reasons it wasn't particularly suited for still photography.
At first the rollerskaters were not 'embraced' by a lot of local surfers, skaters, and locals in general, but then after a while they realized that skating was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon after the waves got 'blown out'. And it was a more social scene which did not require a lot of technique ( a lot of the surfers were not about to look like fools on a skateboard).
So anyway, I decided to try a roller skate gallery with what I've got, which isn't all that much. I went through all the negatives and scanned anything that was connected to the roller skate scene and copied in a few pix from other galleries too. These are mostly in date order. By the mid eighties there were very few skates to be seen in the oceanfront shots......