PUT A PIN IN IT
A last look at the Slatington Bowling Center as lanes, pins and more are auctioned off
Bowling pins are among the items up for auction before the Slatington Bowling Center is torn down. The 60-year-old bowling alley on Route 873 in Washington Township, Lehigh County, closed March 31. It will be torn down and replaced by a couple of commercial buildings.
Strange to set foot in the Slatington Bowling Center now.
The pins still stand at the ends of the 16 polished lanes. The balls — in black, red, blue, green and orange, or opalescent combinations of those colors — remain on the racks. The shoes are in their nooks, awaiting a quick spray of Lysol. The snack stand menu still offers burgers and fries. And, in the back, the U-shaped bar seems ready to support a couple of dozen elbows hoisting Michelob Lights between rounds of darts.
Not for long. The 60-yearold bowling alley on Route 873 in Washington Township, just north of the Slatington line, closed for good March 31 and has a yet-to-be-determined date with the wrecking ball.
It succumbed to the same pressure as so many other businesses this past year — the pandemic. Business restrictions kept the lanes closed for about five months altogether and discouraged many league bowlers — by and large an older crowd — from coming out.
The new owner of the property plans to put a couple of commercial buildings there. But before that, the innards of the alley have to be liquidated — an unhappy word, especially when applied to a business that entertained generations with the deceptively simple challenge of rolling a heavy ball toward a distant set of pins.
“We’ve never sold the contents of a bowling alley before,” said Catherine Keys, co-owner of Tom Hall Auctions in North Whitehall Township, taking a couple of visitors on a tour of the building Tuesday as the online auction, open to prebidding for a month, wound down. “We’re literally selling everything, whether it’s attached to the building or not.”
That means the synthetic wood of the lanes is going, and the patterned carpet that glows under black light, and the scorekeeping monitors, and the Brunswick 2000 ball returns, and the big behind-the-scenes machines that sweep up the pins and reset them.
In that part of the building, accessed through a black curtain between the center lanes, it is dim and smells of machine oil — an antique sort of smell, in its way. Keys said the owners of other alleys, in New York, Harrisburg and elsewhere, have bid on the pinsetters, which are quite expensive to purchase new.
The lane cleaning machine, another pricey piece of equipment, was attracting a lot of attention. So were the monitors and the benches and other seating, plus kitchen equipment, lockers, a soda machine — on and on.
“It’s not necessarily just bowling people but people who think ‘Gee, this would look great in my bar,’ ” Keys said.
In all, 236 lots were up for bid. Once they’re sold, the winners will come retrieve their items and that will mark the final end of Slatington Bowling Center.
A genial man with a long white beard who opened the doors for Keys and her guests had worked there for years. He said he didn’t want his name in the paper; he seemed a little choked up.
He’s surely not the only one shedding a tear. On the wall next to the office, two sheets of paper listed the league and individual scoring leaders for 2020-21. Surely the fellow who bowled 299 — a point shy of 300, the bowling equivalent of baseball’s perfect game — will look wistfully at whatever buildings rise in the alley’s place.
No one will ever have as much fun in those.