The balls still rumble down the floodlighted lanes and the pins still thunder with each strike, but the sounds at Loyal Inn Bowling are a thin echo of earlier days.
“When I was a kid this place was wall-to-wall people,” said Robert DiMicelli, a son of the owner of Loyal Inn, as he looked around the 48-lane bowling center where only four lanes were in use. “It’s a shame to see it go down like this.”
Loyal Inn is the last of seven bowling alleys that once hugged the eastern shore of Westchester County and, like alleys across the United States, it has been battered by profound changes in American family life and by a transformation in the way Americans spend their leisure hours.
Many of the women who once filled bowling alleys in the morning hours now spend their days at work. And fewer men seem able to commit to spending one night a week as members of bowling leagues, the backbone of the business.
“Women want their husbands home and they give them a little more static than they used to 10, 15 years ago,” said Jay Tartaglia, whose Rye Ridge Bowling in Rye Brook closed last April.
Over the last generation, bowling promoters say, athletics-minded Americans have come to prefer high-energy sports such as jogging and racquetball while the more passive sports enthusiasts have chosen to collapse at home with rented videos or the rich assortment of sports shows on cable television. The ranks of people who go bowling, a sport that requires only moderate exertion, have been gnawed away from both sides.
Finally, bowling alleys make no economic sense in parts of the country that have seen rents soar.
“The land that a bowling center is on is worth more as something else: an office building or a shopping strip,” said Mark Miller, assistant editor of Bowling Magazine, published by the American Bowling Congress, the leading membership group.
Loyal Inn is now seeking permission from the Town of Mamaroneck, which embraces Larchmont, to convert itself into a five-store shopping strip that will contain satellites of the Staples office supply and CVS pharmacy chains.
If that happens, Loyal Inn would share the fate of 3,500 alleys across the country that have closed in the past 30 years. According to the American Bowling Congress, in the peak year of 1963 there were 10,883 bowling alleys in the United States. Last year, there were 7,395.
The number of occasional bowlers — those who bowl at least once a year — is still impressively high — 82 million. But the number of league bowlers is down to 6 million and, according to Miller, has been declining by 3 percent to 6 percent a year. As a result, New York City, which had 160 bowling centers three decades ago, now has just 42, and Milwaukee, Detroit and other meccas of bowling have seen similar erosions. High-tech bowling emporiums have been opened in the Sun Belt and southern New Jersey, but those moves have not been enough to offset the nationwide decline.
Loyal Inn’s owner, Vincent DiMicelli, 62, and his son, Robert, blame one specifically local condition for the downturn in their business — the rising cost of housing in places such as Mamaroneck and New Rochelle that have driven out their mostly modest-income clientele.
“We live in a white-collar area and bowling is a blue-collar sport,” Robert DiMicelli said. “Executives and high-income people don’t go bowling. Mechanics and bus drivers go bowling.”
