The Rink Shopping Center conceals a spectacular secret beneath its green barn-like façade. Built in 1884 as the Crescent City Skating Rink, this Garden District landmark was once billed as the largest roller skating venue in the country, hastily erected to capitalize on crowds flocking to New Orleans for the World's Cotton Centennial Exposition.

The original rink boasted a soaring thirty-one-foot ceiling, illuminated by massive skylights, with three tiers of opera chairs seating 600 spectators. Above the polished skating floor, diners watched the action from gallery tables while an eight-piece band played from a dedicated balcony. Separate parlors with attached skate rooms catered to ladies and gentlemen willing to pay for private parties, all warmed by an immense fireplace.

After just two years of wheeling success, the rink closed and began a remarkable series of incarnations: mortuary, livery stable, grocery store, frame shop, warehouse, coin laundry, barbershop, and finally a Texaco station by 1978. Real estate visionaries George Farnsworth Jr. and Martha Ann Samuel rescued the unrecognizable building, working from an 1885 illustration to restore its historic character as an intimate shopping center.

VoiceMap's self-guided Garden District audio tour begins at The Rink, using its roller skating origins to illustrate how New Orleans entrepreneurs have always known how to entertain visitors, tracing connections between nineteenth-century spectacle and today's boutique shopping experience in the heart of antebellum mansion country.