If it was said once, it was said a thousand times, usually over a 90-cent “shorty” and after a very trying game: “I’ll never bowl in this dump again.”
But they did. Over and over again for most of this century. Until last Friday.
Now they can’t because the old dump-a creaky old dive up 22 dusty stairs on the second floor over the card shop down at 35th and Archer, the place everyone in the neighborhood called Petersen’s or Pete Alley’s, with its archaic bowling lanes and leaden if not obstinate pins, leaky tin ceiling and 65-foot-long bar with a lady bartender who loves bowlers but hates to bowl and a sign behind her that states, “If You Got Nothing To Do, Don’t Do It Here”-is closed.
It closed quietly last week while no one was looking up. And with its closing, so ended an institution, known not just down on the South Side, or in Chicago or even Illinois, but worldwide.
“People, bowlers from overseas, would come to Chicago and what did they ask for? They did not want to go visit a modern American bowling alley in the suburbs. They wanted to go to Archer and 35th Street. They wanted to go to Petersen’s,” says Mort Luby Jr., publisher of the Bowlers Journal, the premier bowling magazine. “What a fantastic, weird and wonderful place.”
“There’s a zillion stories about Petersen’s,” says Sam Weinstein, bowling commentator for WGN radio for nearly 60 years. “I guess the one that sums the place up is the day I was sitting at the bar down there and Hall of Famer Frank Benkovic came in with his ball, full of pep, and two and a half hours later, he walked out to the bar, exasperated, and I asked him what he shot and he said, `I’m never coming back to this place again.’ “
“A typical remark,” Weinstein continues. “You heard that all the time at Petersen’s. But they always came back.” Fittingly, a good-humored sign that one passed as one left the bowling area and entered the bar, declared, “Pete! This is Positively and Definitely My Very Next To Last Time!”
“Petersen’s doctored the lanes; they did something to the pins,” said Weinstein. “Whatever they did, they made it difficult to score high so the average person, the amateur bowler, might do well and the professional had to work for his money. It saddens me to think it is gone. It’ll sadden all of them, even those who sometimes when they got low scores, wished it would burn down.”
What was Petersen’s?
It was a neighborhood joint. People danced there first, back in 1904 when the building was put up. They came to dance on the second floor on Friday and Saturday nights. Girls met boys and they waltzed, polkaed and flirted. Then Louis “Pete” Petersen came along and turned the second floor dance hall into a bowling alley. In 1921, he started something-a bowling tournament that could make a common man rich if he won ($1,000 first prize in the early days). It was called the Petersen Classic. It was, says Weinstein, “the grandaddy of the big money bowling tournaments.”
Professional bowling accelerated around the country starting in the 1950s and became big time. But Petersen’s stayed the same. Quaint, some called it. Cozy, others said. Crazy, said the pros who dared to enter its tournament. (It was open to anyone. You just paid the entry fee, bowled eight games and hoped that by the end of the season no one would top your score.) But they always came back to the place to play it again.
“You know, this is the neighborhood place where all our kids learned to bowl. The little ones would climb those 22 stairs up to that old dive where they put up with the kids after school dropping the balls and throwing them into the walls and across the alleys,” says neighbor Kathy Otto.
“But then again, it was the site of the Petersen Classic and people would come from all over the country in big fancy cars and motor homes to this old bowling alley on the second floor of our neighborhood. We loved the place but it amazed us that everyone else did too.”
`Discussed and cussed’
People did love it. How could you not? For the Petersen Classic, which ran from October to July, and this year had 13,000 participants fighting for a $45,000 first prize, was as crowded as ever this year. They came from all over the country to compete in an outmoded, dusty, dank, unrehabbed, totally non-modern, back-to-the-’20s or -’30s kind of place.
“In the second floor, an almost 19th Century setting of dreary, frowsy Archer-35th St. Recreation on Chicago’s seedy Southwest side, a locale stark enough in its antiquity to frighten any Madison Avenue imagemaker right out of his Brooks Brothers suit, the bowlers face a test as gruelling as any basic training obstacle course. . . . It is the most discussed and cussed bowling establishment in the world,” wrote Bowlers Journal in the early 1960s.
The place hasn’t changed a whit. “It’s bowling in the trenches,” says one South Side neighbor, who used to drop by to bowl in a neighborhood league.
“There’s no place like it anywhere,” says John Spiewak, who has worked there for 11 years.
“This place was built old. Everyone says that when they come in and look around,” says Sandy Patterson, an office employee for the place. “And you know, when I found out last week it was closing, it became a stomach ache that wouldn’t go away. I’ve spent half my life here.”
“They tell you it’s old, it’s quaint, it’s something they’ve never seen before, and then they tell you, `Don’t change it,’ ” says Lesha Shea, the bartender who does not bowl but served 90-cent short beers between bowling sets. “They’ve had a lot of fun here. We’ve had bowling squads that came in that were Polish bands, and while they were waiting to bowl, they’d bring out their instruments and play. I’ve had people come in and say they were here 20 years ago and the place still looks the same.”
`The time has come’
“The party, I am afraid, is over,” says owner Mark Collor, 79, the son-in-law of Louis Petersen, and the man who has added Toulouse-Lautrec posters to the walls next to original oils of champion bowlers of yesteryear. “The roof has been giving us a headache, the building is old, we’ve put a lot of money into it, but the lanes are going and it is time to close down. It’s for sale: the Petersen Classic and the building itself. But there have been no takers, so now we have simply shut down. The recent rains are seeping through the roof onto the bowling lanes. The time has come.”
Last Friday night, the faithful came in to bowl and say goodbye. They bowled with exuberance and wore “Good-Bye Petersen’s” hats. They sat on the bluebird blue park benches that are bolted down behind the alleys and got tears in their eyes as the evening grew old. Many were from the neighborhood, many were not-they were from the suburbs but had come in every Friday night to bowl at one of the oldest bowling alleys in the Midwest. As usual, none left their coats in the checkroom where the sign still reads, “Coat check-35 cents” and the long-unused cash register shows “$00.00.” They paid little notice to the dusty, now empty lockers that sat open or the old sepia pictures of bowling greats that line the walls.
The kids hung out in the old-time, all-wood, accordian-doored phone booth, while their mothers and fathers bowled on 12 lanes (four others were covered with a tarp because of the leaky roof). “It’s a crap shoot when you bowl here, but it’s fun. It’s history and it’s tradition,” said one bowler on the last night.
“There are myths about the place,” says publisher Luby. “One myth is that they put the pins up on the roof during the winter time to make them heavier and harder to knock them down.”
Oh, they joked the last night about the time the pigeons got in through the ventilation system and flew down over the lanes. They laughed about the old-fashioned bell that got rung behind the bar whenever it was time to play another game.
But they weren’t laughing or joking when they left for the last time-packing up their bowling ball and descending the stairs down to the street.
“Whenever anyone bowls here and encounters the uneven alleys and the heavy pins and every other obstacle in this old dive, they say definitely this is the last time,” said one woman walking out with her bowling bag. “But it never is. So maybe it won’t be now. Like the sign says, not the last time. The next to the last time. So there’s hope I’ll be back here again.”
