Route 66 Bowl, a facility which had served bowling fans for about a half-century near the Missouri-Kansas border, recently was purchased and is being converted into a wrestling training center and gym.
KSN-TV reported Dave O’Banion, owner of Renegade Wrestling Academy in Joplin, Missouri, recently bought the facility, which also was known as Route 66 Bowling Center:
The building is currently being gutted of the bowling lanes, and will soon have mats and training equipment in place.
O’Banion says, “Where the lanes were before, that’s all going to be wrestling mats. And then we’re looking at maybe doing a small fitness center in there- a 24 hour set up to where you just have a card key and you can go in whenever you want to go in.”
The station said the previous owners no longer could care for the business. A recent Craiglist ad for the property mentioned the eight-lane facility came with “significant improvements.” A cached internet listing for the property reported the alley once was known as Crown Lanes. According to an archived story in the Joplin Globe, it was known as Crown Lanes as late as 2009.
Below is a photo of the inside of Route 66 Bowl from the ad:
According to Jasper County property records, the previous owners were Gerald and Sherry Lawrence of Joplin.
The TV report stated Route 66 Bowl was in Galena, Kansas. But because it was on the Missouri side of the border, it technically was in Joplin. It sat at 7813 W. Old Route 66, just a few hundred feet east of the Kansas border on an original alignment of the Mother Road.
A number of prominent bowling alleys along Route 66 have gone out of business in recent years, including 66 Bowl in Oklahoma City and the Rose Bowl in Tulsa.
These closures are partly because of a general decline in the popularity of bowling over the decades. In the 1960s, about 12,000 bowling alleys existed in the United States. There were less than half of that number 10 years ago, and that figure undoubtedly is even smaller today.
One of the most historic bowling alleys I know of on Route 66 is Saratoga Lanes in Maplewood, Missouri, which marked its centennial last year and remains one of the last upstairs alleys in the St. Louis region. Saratoga Lanes sits about a block south of Manchester Road, an original alignment of Route 66.
(Excerpted Google Street View image of Route 66 Bowl near Joplin, Missouri; image of Route 66 Bowl interior via Craigslist)
Hope they keep the sign up. May be not the best looking along the road, but characteristic in its own way.