Touching Down at Xanadu, a Mystical Hub for New York’s Forgone Skaters

It’s Saturday night and the goths have taken over Xanadu Roller Arts. Clad in black, leather and latex, the mob spins around the rink with the fervor and careless elbows of a mosh pit. When one skater goes down, so does another and often a third, as those less accustomed to life on four wheels struggle to stay upright. The newly-opened roller rink-slash-concert venue-slash-club in Bushwick is hosting Goth Sk8 Night, soundtracked by a DJ named Military Scientist. By noon on Sunday, the crowd was replaced by Dreamland Disco Brunch, a ‘70s-themed event where skaters are encouraged to don “full disco glam” and battle it out on the rink in spirited dance-offs.

Mirroring Xanadu’s eclectic approach to programming – which also features, over the next week, “skaterobics,” a DJ residency and themed skate nights dedicated to Sade, country and old-school hip-hop – is a 16,000-square-foot interior that could serve as an encyclopedia of ‘70s aesthetics. Every surface is a different color or funky pattern: orange and green booths and tables painted with clouds flank one wall, opposite a glowing bar lined with swivel stools. Overhead, a hot pink wavy ceiling fixture segues into plain stucco and through the open bar, one can watch the action unfold on the rink while sipping a signature cocktail (those wearing skates are maxed out at two drinks) or chowing down on concession food like a hot dog flight and Frito Chili Pie. The reverie continues in the bathroom, where another DJ stand bears the honorific “Club Flush.”

“It felt like this dream to open a psychedelic roller disco,” says Xanadu founder Varun Kataria. “I needed to have the imagination to look at it and envision what that space could be.”

Matt Harrington/Xanadu

Kataria rolls around on his own set of skates throughout Goth Sk8 Night, save an hour spent seated as he was inked by that evening’s pop-up tattoo artist. Despite being a seemingly adept skater, he notes that he only began skating regularly once he got to work on building Xanadu.

The past year has served as a crash course in skating, as a sport, and the scene more broadly, but Kataria has been at the center of Bushwick nightlife for much of the past decade. Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he lived in New Orleans, Berlin and a “few other cities” before returning to Minneapolis to attend law school, but he preempted his graduation with “a vow of unemployment,” declaring that he wouldn’t work for anyone but himself.

It was during his final year of school that his friend Tyler Erickson told him about the upcoming estate sale of The Turk’s Inn, a kitschy Turkish supper club in Hawyard, Wisconsin (about 2 1/2 and a half hours from Minneapolis) that had been open since 1934 and hosted a revolving door of famous guests, then-President John F. Kennedy among them.

Xanadu

As longtime patrons of the restaurant, Kataria and Erickson sought to recreate The Turk’s Inn on Bushwick’s Starr Street, a thriving row of dives, music venues and eateries. The two bought everything at the auction: wall art, furniture, signage, even the restaurant’s distinct V-shaped bar. Other details were carefully replicated, such as a custom reproduction of the original Turk’s Inn carpet. In 2019, the revived Turk’s Inn opened its doors, this time, to contemporary Brooklyners rather than Midwesterners making a roadside pit stop. To appeal to the Bushwick scene – and entertain his own musical inclinations – the restaurant launched alongside an attached live music venue called the Sultan Room.

Six months after opening, both spaces were forced to halt operations due to the pandemic. As a recent transplant who had spent his entire time in the city entrenched in a construction project, Kataria recalls that losing the community he had begun to form through the Turk’s Inn was a “lonely, difficult, disconnected, isolated experience.” He managed to keep the restaurant afloat during the pandemic, operating, like many restaurants, on a week-to-week basis.

“I realized how critical these ‘third spaces’ are for us to kind of foster connections, especially in a place like New York, where we don’t really live our lives in our homes,” Kataria says.

“Man, it’s either double down or fold.”

Just as the pandemic’s darkest days passed and The Turk Inn’s was regaining its footing, Kataria was catching up with a longtime friend, in his own words “ringing my hands about the pandemic and how hard it was to survive the thing.”

“And I was like, “man, it’s either double down or fold.”

The friend had grown up in a family of roller skaters who operated their own rink in the Midwest and invited Kataria to fly out and witness the ins and outs of running a rink firsthand. One of the main obstacles in operating the Turk’s Inn – second to closing for in-person dining during lockdown – was a seemingly ceaseless barrage of supply chain issues. Kataria recalls a period in which he couldn’t stock mezcal due to, of all things, a cardboard box shortage.

“One of my pandemic takeaways was that the more complex a thing is, the more pieces can fall apart,” he says. “And roller skating is so simple. You don’t need to receive a shipment every day, you’re not creating trash and garbage. If you got wheels on your feet, you can do the thing. You need a floor and you need skates. That’s it.”

Xanadu

By the summer of 2022, the idea was still in its infancy when Kataria caught up with his next door neighbor, who operated a nearby restaurant supply business out of a former factory. The neighbor was readying to retire by the end of the year and preparing to sign over the lease to a new renter after months of negotiations.

Kataria had seen the factory before and figured he might look into renting it for his rink concept years down the line, especially since it was around the block from the Turk’s Inn. The chance of losing out on the space activated a “full freakout inside of [him]” and he became intent on having it. He convinced his neighbor to put a full stop to negotiations and less than a month later, had signed the lease himself, officially gaining possession of the space in March 2023.

Renovations were carried over the next year at breakneck pace. Kataria was inspired by futurist and modernist interior designers, taking notes from the plastic furniture of Danish designer Verner Panton and for lighting, from the American artist James Turrell, best known for installations that merge natural and artificial light.

“I knew that the space needed to really manipulate people’s feelings,” Kataria says. “It’s meant to be felt intensely and actively shape your experience, not disappear into the background.”

Matt Harrington/Xanadu

Underlining the overarching concept was the notion that a rink could intuitively double as a concert venue if one merely situated a stage alongside it. Separate from its themed skate nights, Xanadu’s puts on non-skating concerts every few days, which encompass a spectrum of musical genres. Next month, Syria artist Omar Souleyman will play an electronic dabke set, followed by indie crooner Okay Kaya two days later and, towards the end of the month, Mel C of the Spice Girls will be DJing.

At the forefront of the hybrid design process was cultivating a venue that, unlike the typical concert venue, could operate during the daytime and the night hours, seamlessly transitioning between the two. Mirrors and glass was used to amplify the natural light that flows through Xanadu’s entryway, while the actual rink is a dark, neon-lit cavern, centered around a disco ball not hung, but rather uniquely embedded within the ceiling. A pool of contrasting colors and clashing patterns, Xanadu is maximalist, bordering on garish.

“So much of New York hospitality is like, “let me show you how minimal I can be.” I want to go the opposite direction,” Kataria says. “If I was trying to play a game of the most sophisticated, elegant, tasteful, design, I would lose every single time.”

Mike Shane/Xanadu

Kataria landed on the Xanadu name after watching the eponymous 1980s fantasy film, in which Olivia Newton-John plays a Greek muse who inspires a struggling artist to open up a roller disco. “As I was watching it, I was like, “is this my biography being told to me by this movie?,” Kataria reflects.

It helped that the concept was predated by roller skating’s explosion during the pandemic, as those under lockdown sought out inventive, socially distanced hobbies and others, a means of exercising amid gym closures. Skate content creators on TikTok went viral with cinematic videos of figure-eights in the park and some skate brands reported up to 800% upticks in sales. There was even a shortage in skates, as the sport ascended underground status to become a viral phenomenon. Although the craze has since subsided from its pandemic peak, New York is still home to a medley of enduring skate meetups, clubs and derbies.

The only issue? There hadn’t been a ground zero for all the skaters to convene – prior to Xanadu, that is.

As skating lulled throughout the late aughts and early 2010s, the city’s few rinks shuttered. Hailed as the “last remaining roller rink,” Staten Island’s RollerJam USA, which itself held reunions for defunct rinks like Roll-A-Palace and Skate Odyssey, was the final victim this past May. Rinks typically require at least 10,000-square-feet of space. At such a size, the cost already runs high and RollerJam’s landlord had raised the rent. Leagues such as Gotham Roller Derby, the oldest of its kind in New York, practice outside during the summer but struggle to find a space come wintertime each year and have previously resorted to skating in warehouses.

 

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Wednesday evenings are a weekly fixture in the Xanadu community, when skaters gather for Community Skate. The no-frills session still features music from a local DJ but the focus is on the sport itself and attracts more advanced skaters. The venue also partners with figures in the community like Lola Starr and Harry Martin, to organize dedicated events for skate subcultures like goth, metal and hardcore. Some skating communities are more established than others but Kataria says he wants to expand the horizons of the scene, whether that’s introducing new people to skating or giving community members access to new forms of art and expression. Xanadu recently hosted a session centered on Bollywood music. Coming up, they’ll be putting together a honky-tonk night.

“I have no idea how it’s gonna work but it’ll be really fun, no doubt. Maybe we can do some line dancing,” Kataria says. “I’m not a skate insider, more of an outsider but I’ve always been interested in creating a mixing ground and building new communities.”

“The mission isn’t to just cater to the existing communities, but rather to foster entirely new ones.”