After making some rounds yesterday I stopped in at one of my favorites lunch stops The Majestic Cafe for a quick (and affordable) lunch and got to talking with Joe Zainea about the rich history of the venue his family owns and operates on Detroit's Main Street.
It turns out that the Garden Bowl has turned 100 years young and I convinced Joe to send us a writeup about his recollection of the Garden Bowl's history for your reading pleasure.
Enjoy and thank you Joe!
Garden Bowl
‘Knocking them down
for 100 years on Detroit’s Main Street’
Happy
Centennial Garden Bowl
History of the Garden
Bowl
The Garden Bowl,
(Garden Bowling Alley c: 1913), opened its doors on August 1, 1913.
The owners were John Bauer and Irv Giese. It opened with
ten lanes on the first floor and billiards on the second floor.
The building extended thirty-five feet into Woodward Avenue from where it
now rests. Detroit widened Woodward Avenue in 1934. There were
storefronts on Woodward and a hallway that led to the bowling lanes behind these
stores. The pin boys set the pins by hand with pegs coming out the
center of the pin spots. There was a foot pedal that the pin boy
pressed with his foot to make the pegs rise. In those days, pin
setting was referred to as “goofing wood”. The pin boys lived in flophouses on
skid row on Michigan Avenue run by various religious groups. Mr.
Bauer was one of the organizers of the BPAA and was its first executive
director.
Some of the first meeting of the BPAA took place right
here in the Garden Bowl.
The building was
renovated in 1926 by adding space on the second floor to accommodate twelve more
lanes. The grand stands that surrounded the billiard area were
removed. The billiard aspect was lost to the new Detroit
Recreation on Lafayette Street in downtown Detroit. It had four
floors of twenty-two lanes each and four floors of billiards. It
too, was quite a place, a working mans country club. The Garden
Recreation, as it was then known, was the hot spot of the twenties and part of
the thirties. Major jackpot bowling took place.
Groups of bowlers would come to Detroit and line up jackpots to challenge
our Detroit bowlers. The largest meeting place for these groups
was the Casino Bowling Alley on Woodward and Temple. Many times
the out-of-towners would require a neutral bowling center for the match, and
most likely it would the Garden. Joe Norris once told me that
lanes 13 & 14 on the second floor were his biggest winnings alleys.
I remember that
this area of Woodward Avenue was packed with people.
They used
public transportation like streetcars to get here. We didn’t even
have a parking lot. The neighborhood had plenty of SRO’s (single
resident occupant hotels), like the one across the street from here, known then
as the Strathmore Hotel. They were just a simple room with beds
and a dresser. Many people from as far a Flint would take the
train to Detroit, and get off at the E. Grand Boulevard station and take a cab
to work on Monday mornings. They would team up with others to
share the one room and the common facilities were down the hall. A
quarter would give you use of a shower and a towel and soap. These
men would leave for their homes after work on Fridays via the train.
While they were in town, they would use the Garden as their place to eat
three meals a day, socialize at the bar and bowl several nights of the
week. Even more people had their homes and apartments in this
neighborhood. We were filled with leagues like office groups,
unions, fraternal groups and house leagues. We were very busy
then.
Leagues like the
Detroit Free Press All Stars bowled on Thursdays and the Detroit Women’s All
Star Classic bowled on the 2nd floor on Tuesday nights.
I remember my dad leaving the Garden Recreation on Friday nights and the
same bowlers would be bowling on Saturday morning when he brought my brothers
and me to bowl in the youth league. Yes, we were open all
night. My dad bought the Garden Recreation in 1946.
He owned a slaughterhouse on the Eastern Market and the workers in that
industry would gather after work, about 2 p.m., at the Avalon Recreation.
It was located above the Gratiot Central Market. They would
play poker and kibbutz. The owner of the Avalon told my dad that
the Garden was for sale. The owner, Bill Nagy passed away and his
wife did not want to run the place. He took it over in the fall of
1945 under contract and concluded the sale in August
1946.
Perhaps I can
name thirty-five bowling alleys that were within two miles of here, back in the
early sixties; today there is only one, the Garden. It was quite a
place. It was truly a workingman’s clubhouse. I
remember that there were many pay phones in the hall leading to the
lanes. You would pick the phone up and it would be answered in the
basement by your bookie. Henry, an African American, was our counterman.
He was a concessionaire, and the perfect gentleman’s gentleman. He wore a
smock and a small leather bow tie. He reserved your bowling ball
behind the counter for you for when you arrived to bowl, he checked your coat
and had ready your special cigar rolling on a machine that dampen it.
He cut the tip off with a small cutter similar to a paper cutter.
There was a pipe that came up from the floor with a gas jet to light your
cigar. He brushed your coat and hung it up. He
rented you his bowling shoes and took yours to polish them while you
bowled. He would sometimes clean and block your hat while you
bowled. And then, of course he would book your numbers and
horses. At the end of the day, he would probably make one dollar
off you. He sent all his children through
college.
In 1966, we
bought the building to the south of us, torn down the big walls between the two
buildings and added new rest rooms and six more lanes. This
brought us to twenty-eight lanes. We did this to hang onto the
customers that were leaving for the suburbs. We renovated the
place with underlane returns, something new at the time, new masking units and
put automatics on the second floor, the automatics were installed on lanes on
the first floor in 1958. Well, the old customers left
anyway. So we did a marketing plan to replace these departing
bowlers with new ones. First the genre was Asian Americans and
Appalachians, then they too left for the suburbs and then we directed our
efforts to teach “Learn to Bowl+” to the African American genre.
It took off very well until the point that we had over 100 bowlers per
lane per week bowling. That’s 2800 bowlers by 1972.
But lo and behold, in the late eighties they too began to leave for the
suburbs.
As my brother’s
and my families grew, we needed more income. We started Detroit
Bowling & Trophy. We made the trophies in the basement of the
Garden Bowl and sold them in a small store in the front of the Garden
Bowl. This business grew so well that we had to find more space,
so we bought the corner building, to the north, and made the trophies on the
2nd and 3rd floor and made a very nice store on the main
floor. Still this was not enough space for making our goods, so we
rented and eventually bought the Majestic Theatre building and made our trophies
and plaques there and then opened another business called Sportsprint to silk
screen shirts and other promotional items. We also were in the
business of resurfacing and constructing bowling lanes. This
business took us all over the State of Michigan and of course we would sell our
products at the same time. In 1992, we split the businesses up
into two companies with my brother taking the trophy and silk screen businesses
and I and my sons took the bowling center and Café and the properties.
Eventually the trophy company moved to the suburbs. As synthetic lanes
came into being, we dropped the resurfacing and construction
business.
In 1992, we
removed the suspended ceiling on the 2nd floor and eight
lanes. We set up a dance area in the space of four lanes and ten
pool tables in space of four lanes. We left four lanes.
We called it the Magic Stick. It was like some rich man
recreation room in his basement. It took off well. A
year later we removed the remaining four lanes to expand the dance area. In 1984
we acquired the Majestic Theatre next door and built the Gnome Restaurant now
named the Majestic Café, and Majestic Club.
That is where we are
now.
The genre of the
place now is urban, well-educated, young people who live in the many lofts in
the area and attend one of the colleges here in Midtown Detroit.
And they have discovered a new fun thing to do with their spare
time. They Bowl, not quite like it was in the old days, but with
the lights off, spinning mirror balls, smoke machines, lanes glowing in the dark
and a live DJ spinning their favorite music.
In 2012, we
replaced the sixteen wood lanes with new AMF Phonemic Lanes. Soon we will
renovate the concourse with new seating, done in a retro way, and carpeting and
tile and the bar. Both the Garden Bowl building and the Majestic Theatre
building are on the National Registry of Historic
Places.
The Garden Bowl
is now a division of our overall company, Majestic Theatre Center, Inc., which
includes the Majestic Café, The Majestic Theatre, The Magic Stick, Sgt
Pepperoni’s Pizza, The Alley Deck, and of course the
Garden Bowl, aka the “ROCKn’BOWL”.
We call it a “City Block of Fun
and Dining on Detroit’s Main Street”.
