Daniel R.

I think inline skating is all but dead in Boston. During a recent night of heavy blading I managed to lose a couple of bolts holding my wheels on while out blading. Thankfully I didn't notice this until a couple of days later when I was rotating my wheels. I have no chance of retracing my route to find the missing bolts. My long time use of a hop-up kit saved me from having the wheel fall completely off.

Being without blades makes short little mid-day excursions a little more tedious so I went out in search of replacement parts. I've been blading around Boston since I got here. Things have changed since then. Eric Flaim's Motion Sports on Newbury used to be the place to go. Long since gone and replaced by a Blades Board and Skate. They even had a couple of locations around the city including Harvard Square. Alas they are also gone. A place I never went to but looked promising was Beacon Hill Skate Shop. A phone call to them and they seemed to have moved way south of the city.
True East Skate Shop in downtown Boston is for skateboarders only. Orchard Skateshop looks to be the same. Those are the specialty shops, either gone or not for inline.

There is always City Sports, but they are more about the simple gear not cross pull hop-up kits or a dozen plus wheel variations with different hardnesses, composites, and diameters. Even some of the online specialty shops I used to buy in bulk from when I was going through a set of wheels a month, seemed to have moved on. And forget the fact that I contemplated getting news blades. Maybe I'm old fashioned but Rollerblade's ABT system is still tops in my book for being able to break hard while in traffic, keep all your wheels on the ground, and not rip your wheels to shreds. Very few if any models out there offer anything like that. Maybe I could learn new techniques but too many years of certain habits are hard to break :)