Been Bowling Lately?

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From NYT

As New York struggles to resurrect its economy, it needs powerful new engines of growth. Wall Street may look sturdier, but it will never be the old Wall Street again, when $10 routinely became $1 million during your lunch break. Another eruption in real estate prices? Dubious. The new sports stadiums? Not going to get us there.

There must be an answer.

There is.

Bowling alleys.

Been over to the Port Authority Bus Terminal for anything other than a bus? Gone to the second floor, next to Gate 230? Noticed the velvet ropes staffed by a black-suited bouncer, earpiece nuzzling his ear?

Why is he there? To select the appropriate customers to bowl at the overhauled Leisure Time Bowl. Yes, there is a dress code at the bowling alley.

“We don’t allow those real large jeans that almost fall off your hips,” said Ayman Kamel, the executive general manager there. “Or those bandannas that represent gangs. None of those big visual gold chains.”

How about a bowling shirt?

“Well, as long as it’s a fine-looking shirt,” he said.

By month’s end, the place will be renamed Frames, and it will open a swank restaurant and V.I.P. lanes (two private lanes with bar), followed by a nightclub later in the year. The entrance will be on Ninth Avenue since the Port Authority is, well, the Port Authority.

Farther down the block, at 42nd and 12th Avenue, is Lucky Strike Lanes, another upscale alley that opened late in 2008 and is an offshoot of a chain that began in Hollywood. Alleys in other boroughs may follow. In Greenwich Village, there is Bowlmor Lanes, a front-runner among the contemporized alleys that was restyled under new ownership in 1997. Three months ago it opened a companion Coney Island games-and-burlesque club called Carnival.

In October, a 90,000-square-foot Bowlmor alley is set to open as the largest retail tenant in the former New York Times building on West 43rd Street. It will cost over $20 million.

In 2007, a comforter factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, became the Gutter bar, with a retro eight-lane alley, the first new one to open in Brooklyn in half a century. Brooklyn Bowl, a combination music club/bowling alley fashioned out of an old iron foundry, followed in Williamsburg last summer. Harlem Lanes arrived in 2006 on West 126th Street, the first bowling alley in Harlem since the Lenox Lanes vanished in the 1980s. These join the more established 300 New York alley at Chelsea Piers.

O.K., maybe this trend isn’t big enough to lift the entire city, but it’s something.