BOWLING PAVILION REOPENS AFTER 9 DECADES

Some bowling centers have closed for a year or two… and sometimes a little longer… and then reopened.

Now, the bowling venue at the historic French Lick Resort in French Lick, Indiana, has come back to life following a hiatus of more than 90 years.

The Billiard and Bowling Pavilion opened at the resort on Christmas Day in 1917, but after the hotel closed in the early 1930s as the Great Depression crippled the country, the wooden lanes warped. In recent years, the resort’s owners have been restoring historic buildings on the property, concluding with the Billiard and Bowling Pavilion.

“To bring back another building that had not been in service for almost a century is a real treat we’re excited to offer our guests,” Chuck Franz, CEO of French Lick Resort, said in a news release. “And we’re bringing it back pretty close to what it was like 100 years ago with six lanes for bowling and the billiard tables in the front section of the building. We relied on historical pictures to bring it back to the life that it had more than a century ago. We wanted to keep it as historically accurate as possible.”

With one notable exception: automatic pinsetting machines.