By the mid-1960s, the sport of bowling had cemented itself into middle-class American life as one of the most popular post-war leisure activities, boasting nearly 40 million players in the United States.1 With this popularity came a new building type that would soon become a ubiquitous landmark in the suburban landscape and lifestyle of mid-century America: the bowling alley.
“The bowling alley is fast becoming one of the most important — if not the most important — local center of participant sport and recreation,” declared the American Society of Planning Officials in 1958.2 Considered the largest membership organization for urban planners, the group devoted an entire issue of their monthly Planning Advisory Service to the discussion of bowling alleys and their design, location, and growing popularity.
Photographic copy of reproduced sketch drawing of coffee shop, dated 1956. Perspective and Section – Holiday Bowl, 3730 Crenshaw Boulevard, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, CA. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress.
It’s generally believed that versions of what we today call “bowling” were played by multiple cultures going back thousands of years, including the Egyptians, the Romans, and later on Germanic tribes. Around 400 CE, these tribes perfected the sport of “kegeling” and then spread it to other parts of Europe, where it flourished among the wealthy and royal.3
Most scholars trace the presence of bowling in the United States to Dutch colonists. Though it enjoyed a certain amount of respectability in the 19th century and was played in some of the most elite private residences in the country, it was ultimately popularized, in part, by the influx of German immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s.4 Through the end of the 19th century, bowling developed as a sport of the masses, typically associated with working-class immigrant communities.
Like other physical sports enjoyed by adult men, bowling frequently appeared in male-dominated saloons and bars alongside billiards and gambling. Because of the real estate that the lanes required, bowling usually happened in windowless basements, which were most often dingy, dark spaces—in short, not an ideal spot for family gatherings.
Lewis Wickes Hines, “Pin boys in Les Miserables Alleys,” 1911. National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress.
Further to that point were the presence of pinboys–young boys or even itinerant men who were paid a few cents to retrieve bowling balls and reset the pins after each set, or “frame.” The job was unskilled but hazardous, with heavy balls speeding down the alleys that could easily smash fingers or cause other injuries. Pinboys were known for being unreliable because of their age, and for being intimidating and trash-talking players, and created an ambiance that was unrefined and rude, at best.5 Incentivized to continue this behavior and keep up the rapid flow of games (their wages were tied to the number of games played), pinboys, together with the bowling lane’s location, made the sport one played almost exclusively by men.
By the 1930s and 1940s, bowling leagues began to formalize and spread across the country. These leagues were popular in factories and manufacturing plants, reinforcing the association of the sport with working-class males.6 World War II saw a great increase in bowling’s popularity and the War Department added more than 4,000 alleys to military bases around the world.7
Arthur Rothstein, “Bowling. Clinton, Indiana,” 1940. Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.
In the early 1950s, American Machine & Foundry (AMF) emerged as a leading company in the bowling industry. Established in 1900 by Rufus L. Patterson, the inventor of the first automated cigarette manufacturing machine, the company produced a wide assortment of recreational equipment in the first half of the twentieth century, ranging from yachts and garden equipment to sewing machines and bowling machinery. During the late 1940s, the company invested in the development of an automatic pinsetter that ultimately eliminated the need for pinboys.8 After several iterations, the improved equipment quickly became very profitable, particularly with the increasing interest in bowling.
Other technological advancements in this period, like foul detectors and underground ball returns, slowly but surely made the game quieter, calmer, and more appealing outside of its original audience. These technological advancements also meant that bowling could be played at any hour of the day, around the clock—and bowling alley owners wanted to take advantage of this by appealing to women and children, who were believed to have free time during the morning and afternoon.
To attract new types of customers, bowling needed to undergo rebranding and establish itself outside of its original male-dominated urban environment. Bowling alley owners sought to appeal to women and children–their new potential clients–through targeted marketing schemes, bowling lessons for new players, and at times, the inclusion of a nursery offering babysitting services on site. One of the most significant changes to the bowling alley, allowing its revamping as a family-friendly, wholesome game, was the design of the building typology itself. Suburban bowling alleys were designed to be easily accessible by car and visually distinct from nearby housing developments—modern, glitzy landmarks of commercial suburbia.9
“Convention Hall, bowling alleys, ladies room.” National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress.
By adopting middle-class commercial aesthetics, bowling alleys were made physically and visually suitable for suburban neighborhoods, and allowed to emerge from the basements of bars and saloons. The style most commonly associated with mid-twentieth century bowling alleys is today called “Googie,” or exaggerated modern: over-the-top, exuberant designs that originated in suburban California in the 1950s and 1960s as a type of roadside architecture that would allow visibility from the street to passing motorists. Renowned architecture critic and Architectural Forum editor, Douglas Haskell, coined the term Googie in a 1952 House & Home article, where he described the style as one whose elements appeared to “hang from the sky”—“an architecture that was up in the air.”10
Characterized by colorful, oversized, and irregularly-shaped signage, Googie buildings featured swooping, dramatic forms and exhibited the influence of space-age technology. Although critiqued by many in the architecture world because of its overtly commercial nature and its “corrupted versions of high-art designs,” Googie was also euphoric, mimicking the era’s exuberance of consumption as new technologies and products became within reach of the middle class.11 In this sense, it embodied the optimism of the era and embraced new materials, forms, and building types.
A spacious cocktail lounge, in Brooklyn, ready for thirsty bowlers. Samuel H. Gottscho, “Gil Hodges Lanes,” 1961. Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Library of Congress.
Googie bowling alleys in particular were designed for the automobile age. They were freestanding buildings surrounded by a large parking lot, with a prominent entry or canopy of an unusual, gravity-defying form made out of cast concrete; their signage distinguished them to passing motorists and established the building as a local landmark in the suburban, low-lying streetscape. Often, the structures were paired with additional programmatic spaces such as a cocktail lounge, restaurant, and beginning in the 1960s, shopping centers to facilitate the presence of the bowling alley as a palace of leisure that had something for the whole family. The alleys were a unique architectural feature in the suburban landscape, distinct yet happily accepted as a new building type associated with the leisure activities that had become the hallmark of middle-class life.
But bowling alleys also distinguished themselves as cultural landmarks in their communities, where newly-developed suburban municipalities found themselves without the traditional civic centers and public meeting spaces that existed in urban areas. Bowling alleys, with their large square footage and presence of meeting rooms for team gatherings and restaurants for family entertainment, presented opportunities for groups to socialize, meet, and even organize outside of work to the point where they were called the “poor man’s country club” in 1958 by the American Society of Planning Officials.12
John Margolies, “Little’s Bowling sign,” 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive, Library of Congress.
The sport started to experience a dip in interest in the 1980s; its continued decline rendered many bowling alleys obsolete and under increasing threat of demolition, often to make way for newer suburban development.13 Major institutions in the bowling world began to fail; AMF, considered one of the largest and most successful operators of bowling alleys in the United States, was acquired by another company in 1985 through a hostile takeover, and then filed bankruptcy first in 2001 and again in 2013.14 At the same time, however, some of the very reasons for the sport’s decline and that of the building type itself are what make it a ripe candidate for adaptive reuse: they are typically found in convenient locations within established suburban communities, are easily accessible from major thoroughfares; have an open, column-free floor plan allowing for a wide variety of potential uses and alterations; and possess iconic signage and designs that have already distinguished them as landmarks in their communities.
Communities across the United States have recognized the possibilities of this unique building type, and have transformed their former bowling alleys into churches, offices, and even bona fide community centers. Indeed, even if these buildings are currently used differently than originally intended, their continued presence allows the story of this building type and sport to remain, even if our leisure time today is now spent differently.
- Andrew Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in Postwar Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 108.
- American Society of Planning Officials, “Bowling Alleys,” Planning Advisory Service (May 1958): 1.
- “History of Bowling,” International Bowling Museum & Hall of Fame.
- Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks, 110–11.
- Ibid., 130–37.
- Emily Verfurth, “Strikes, Spares, and Gutter Balls: A History of Women’s Bowling in Twentieth-Century America” (PhD diss., Texas Tech University, 2012), 25–26.
- Patricia L. Dooley, “Jim Crow Strikes Again: The African American Press Campaign Against Segregation in Bowling During World War II,” Journal of African American History 97 (Summer 2012): 272.
- “Development of the Automatic Pinsetter,” Old Bowling.
- Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks, 107–93, esp. 140–42.
- Douglas Haskell, “Googie Architecture,” House & Home 1 (Feb. 1952): 86–87.
- Alan Hess, Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004), 25.
- American Society of Planning Officials, “Bowling Alleys,” 6, 22, 24.
- Patrick Clark, “America’s Vanishing Bowling Alleys,” Bloomberg, July 11, 2014.
- Lee A. Daniels, “AMF Agrees to Offer By Jacobs of $24 a Share,” New York Times, June 15, 1985, p. 35; “Bankruptcy Judge Approves AMF Loan;” New York Times, August 9, 2001, p. 5.
