The bowling alley you never knew
Rob Vassegh
Amy Chiodo lets one fly at the Ball Square alley.
During the day, it's a beat-up building with an old sign. But back in the glory days of candlepin - when Davis Square alone had four bowling alleys - February school vacation was the busiest week of the year at Ball Square Bowling Alley, just on the Medford side of the Somerville line. Kids rattled around the eight lanes from morning to night.
Chatter has run high about Davis Square's only remaining alley, Sacco's Bowl-Haven, owned by a founding family of candlepin. Last month, after long negotiations, the Flatbread Company took over and started to renovate, keeping some of the lanes and adding a pizza restaurant.
In that long furor, few paid attention to the other candlepin alley a mile away, a barely known gem whose fate is far more tenuous than Bowl-Haven's, threatened by the Green Line.
The Ball Square alley is so underused, so quiet most of the time compared to the square's brunch hot spots - the adjoining auto body shop's brown paint has blistered and peeled over the corrugated walls - that one historian neighbor thought it was already dead. "I see the sign and I just assumed it was still there from a long time ago," said Somerville Historic Preservation Commission director Brandon Wilson, who lives on a Ball Square side street. "It's just a whole sad-looking site."
Somerville Museum director Evelyn Battinelli had never been inside, and neither had her usual historical cronies, she said. "It's so obscure."
Hardly unstoried, though. A photo from a 1912 book shows that "it's one of the oldest buildings around," said Tufts anthropology professor David Guss. 100 years ago it housed one of the city's earliest car dealerships, agents for Inter State and Abbot-Detroitcars, phone number 1089.
Not that he's been inside either: "It's never open."
But some locals noticed that for two hours at night, the sign lit up. Inside, they glimpsed people bowling. Private leagues, they heard. For those few, the alley has long been a source of fascination.
"The mysterious secret place!" Jude Shabry of Somerville, 36, called it.
On Feb. 6, Shabry and about 30 other curious souls from a modern-day Somerville community gathering spot - Davis Square LiveJournal - managed to get inside, renting the lanes for an evening. "I wrote a note and put it through the mail slot," said organizer Mare Freed.
They filled the vintage surrounds with music and microbrews, hung their coats under racks filled with gorgeous piped leather bowling bags, knelt low to hit the awkwardly placed reset button under the two-toned wooden ball carriages, and kept score - no computers - on the completely incomprehensible score sheets (not the Somerville High School graphic communications students' finest work). Balls ricocheted down the fluorescent-lit lanes to the white-and-blue backdrop. The place was in good shape.
It was a vision, perhaps, of what the alley once was on a Saturday, and what it might again become. "I could see us coming here for date night," said Matt Ryan of Somerville, 38, who lives a five-minute walk away.
"I wish this was open all the time. I wish this was a real bowling alley," said Rob Vassegh of Somerville, 37.
But that's not likely to happen, even though the loss of Jamaica Plain's Milky Way lanes and the risk of losing Sacco's seems to have revived candlepin for a younger generation.
"I don't want any publicity," said owner "Butch" Foster, sitting behind the gold-flecked Formica counter Feb. 11, a baseball cap pulled down over his white hair. The clatter of pins dropping filled the room. "I'm not open ... I don't have any open bowling business." (The alley's obscurity is bizarre considering that Butch, a.k.a. Herbert F. Foster Jr., chairs the Somerville Zoning Board of Appeals.)
He rents the place out on Saturday nights upon request, usually for league members' birthdays.
The Foster family opened the Ball Square alley in 1964; at one point, they owned two other places in Somerville and Arlington. "For years we were open seven days a week. But things started to change - electronics came in, video games, and a lot of kids lost interest. And then it started coming back, but I'd been at it so long ..." Foster folded his arms tighter and looked away, "I had a son I was going to leave the business to but my son passed away."
If the state has its way, neither family nor fandom will save these lanes. The most recent plans for the Green Line, in the state's Draft Environmental Impact Report, extend the Ball Square station plaza onto the bowling alley's footprint. Foster only found out a month ago himself.
The prospect upset professor Guss. Where planners saw obsolescence, he saw living history. He noted that the building's exterior was almost unchanged from 100 years ago, with the same corrugated siding. "It is just amazing," he marveled. "People should be aware before they tear this place down. ... It should be preserved. It should be landmarked."
Foster himself doesn't bowl anymore, due to a ruptured disc in his back. "But I did. For years I did." He started reminiscing about the old couples' league, his blue eyes taking on the mist of memory. In the summer they'd all go camping together, he said, with the kids. "Those were fun days."
To see more pictures of the alley and the event, view the slideshow.
Contact Danielle at somervillescene@gmail.com
Davis Guss
The site today (above) and as it appeared in 1912, in the book "Somerville, Massachusetts: Beautiful City of Seven Hills - Its History and Opportunities."
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