Seattlest Bowls, Part 5: West Seattle Bowl

Once Leilani Lanes closes, the 32-lane West Seattle Bowl will be Seattle’s biggest bowling alley.

Despite its painfully bland exterior, WSB has a cool, architecturally unique interior. A central walkway divides the building, with lanes 1 through 14 on its north side and lanes 15 through 32 on the south. A high arched ceiling covers the north lanes, while the south lanes have a typically low, sound-reducing ceiling. We suspect the incongruous overall design is due to an earlier expansion project.

Newer renovation is also apparent, seemingly inspired by the current trend toward “upscale bowling lounges” -- fortunately, WSB hasn’t yet veered too far in this direction. Each pair of lanes has a comfy li’l conversation pit: instead of those hard, molded-plastic seats, common at most bowling alleys (and fast-food restaurants), West Seattle has replaced theirs with comfy red- and cream-colored padded benches. They face one another over black, coffee-type tables. And, instead of the typical institutional-tile floors, the off-lane flooring has an attractive dark-blue surface.

We especially like that WSB has kept the lighted triangular AMF “pindicators” at the far end of each lane, showing which pins remain to pick up a spare. They no longer work properly, but they look way better than those horrid Day-Glo masking panels found in every other place. Another design-y touch is, across the walls above the pindicators, “West Seattle Bowl” is written out in a big, lower-case, sans-serif font. Nice.

Despite the cosmetic improvements, the actual lanes at West Seattle Bowl still suck -- they’re scratched and dented from decades of use. Though WSB has the fancy new Brunswick Vector scoring system (and its super-dumb animation), it doesn’t add anything to the bowling experience. And the coin-op amusements are sorely lacking -- there’s no pinball and only two video games (though, to their credit, one of them is World Class Bowling). Still, it’s the only alley we know of with an adjoining Chinese restaurant, should you desire to chow down on moo goo gai pan between frames. And, if it matters, there's always music blasting out over the speakers.

West Seattlites are lucky to have West Seattle Bowl in their neighborhood (along with Lincoln Park, Alki Beach, and Spud). For the rest of us, it’s worth the trip.

(This is the fifth part of an eight-part series. Here are parts one, two, three, and four.)