This big yellow van is bringing roller skating to Torontonians
Mobile roller skate rental company SKATEVAN, is hosting events at Downsview Airport and Evergreen Brickworks this summer
Skating around a roller rink to live DJ music sounds like a dream from a mostly bygone era these days.
For SUSO Skate Co. owners Henry O’Brien and Janine Bartels — a couple who have supplied roller skating rentals at The Bentway for the last five years — it’s a dream worth keeping alive.. Together, they’re determined to revive roller skating culture by making it easy for local residents to access equipment wherever there’s a smooth surface to skate on.
That’s why O’Brien and Bartels are packing their equipment into a van and taking it on the road for their Summer 2026 Skate Tour, a series of skating events taking place in Toronto and across Ontario.
Programming will include a free two-day skating event at Downsview Airport on July 11 and 12, and ticketed skate nights at Evergreen Brickworks running once a month until September.
On June 24, attendees at the first Evergreen Brickworks event lined up to grab a pair of skates, while behind them, a group glided around the figure-eight trail in Koerner Gardens while a live DJ played upbeat dance music.
“It’s like the kickoff of the summer,” said O’Brien.
From The Bentway, to empty mall spaces to a mobile pop-up
O’Brien and Bartels knew that The Bentway’s figure-eight shaped pathway was used as a popular ice skating rink in the winter months, but felt it was underutilized in the summer, so in 2021 they came up with a plan to turn it into a roller skating destination.
O’Brien said he already had the blueprint they needed to bring the vision to life. At the tail end of 2019, he had visited Australia and observed a group of women renting roller skates out of a caravan on a boardwalk.
“I always thought that would do incredibly well in Toronto,” he said.
So he and Bartels approached The Bentway with a pitch to rent roller skating equipment out of a refurbished shipping container. It went so well that they were invited back the following summer, and even attracted an offer to bring their equipment to CF Shops at Don Mills and convert a rooftop parking garage into a pop-up roller rink.
Feeling they could be onto something, they decided to focus their business on turning empty retail and mall spaces in the GTA into pop-up roller skating rinks.
For example, the couple will take over a large store’s retail space in a mall when it becomes empty between leases, offering their services to attract mall goers in the interim period, sometimes spanning several months. There they add fluorescent lights, skate rink partition walls and decorative installations to create a roller rink. If the surface isn’t already smooth, they lay down modular, interlocking plastic floor panels to create an athletic surface.
They’ve successfully done this at the Oshawa Centre, Bramalea City Centre and most recently, Mapleview Centre in Burlington.
“After that we kept being approached by event organizers, by municipalities, by schools, asking if we could bring roller skating to their event,” said O’Brien.
That led the couple to their second roller skating-themed business venture. In 2024, they began renting a U-Haul truck to transport skating equipment to locations for single-day events, and the following year they took the leap to purchase their own van.
Orange-yellow with “SKATEVAN” in bold black text across its side, the vehicle is hard to miss.
“We were inspired by the colours of a school bus,” O’Brien said. “I like that a school bus says exactly what it is, it’s a school bus. This is a skate van.”
While the SUSO Skate Co. business still focuses on large-scale roller rink pop-ups that last months at a time, the van operates as a separate business that transports over 90 pairs of quad roller skates, with accompanying helmets, wrist guards, elbow and knee pads, as well as trained skating staff, wherever they’re requested.
When the van arrives at its destination, O’Brien and Bartels erect a tent that turns into the check-in station, where event attendees can sign a waiver form and pickup equipment.
While some events, like those taking place at Downsview Airport, are first-come-first-serve, tickets to the Evergreen Brickworks skate nights are reserved in advance. If participants plan to bring their own skates, they can stay as long as they want for $10. Otherwise, skate rentals start at $18 per hour and are discounted the longer a participant intends to stay.
For those who want to catch SKATEVAN elsewhere in Ontario, roller skating events will also be taking place monthly in Collingwood and weekly in Stouffville.
By Emma Johnston-Wheeler, TORONTOTODAY.ca
