[CityBoyDoug]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

Nice CBD.



Several of you mentioned your parents spending time (& Honeymooning) in Long Beach back in the 1940s and 50s.
I wonder if they ever spent time at the Long Beach Skating Palace?

circa 1948

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Long...item232aa17050







Sorry, I don't have the street address.
__

I used to live about three blocks from this building.

This skating rink, 278 Alamitos Avenue, is linked to a very tragic and noir story. It involves Randy Kraft, serial murderer, known as the Freeway Killer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Steven_Kraft

Two killers were apparently involved in the December 1974 murder of John Leras, a 17-year-old high school student. The youngest victims, Leras had vanished en route to a Long Beach skating rink, anxious to try out the roller skates he had received for Christmas. Locals told me that Kraft had picked up Leras while he was hitching a ride in front of this skating rink. Hitching rides in California and elsewhere is currently a thing of the past.

Some strollers found John floating in the surf off Sunset Beach, with a wooden surveyor's stake hammered into his rectum. Leras had been strangled while bound, and had alcohol in his system. Two sets of footprints marked the sand where he was carried from a parking lot to the water.

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/s.../kraft/10.html