Terrace Gardens Bowling Rochester Ny

AMF Terrace Garden Lanes at 1151 Ridgeway Ave. has closed after 60 years in business.

Terrace Garden Lanes on Ridgeway Avenue has closed after 60 years in business.

Calls to the facility and owner AMF Bowling Inc. (which is based in Mechanicsville, Virginia) for comment were unsuccessful, but the entrance to the building, which sits near Mt. Read Boulevard in the shadow of the former Kodak Park (now Eastman Business Park), is boarded up, and the marquee out front encourages bowlers to visit other local AMF sites: Dewey Garden Lanes in Greece, Gates Lanes in Gates, Empire Lanes in Webster and Fairview Lanes in Fairport. (Dozens of recent posts on Facebook and Yelp indicate that the center shut down Sunday.)

Offering 56 lanes, Terrace Garden was the second-largest bowling center in Rochester area, said Mark McClain, manager of the Rochester USBC Bowling Association. (Empire Lanes is the largest with 64 lanes.)

The front entrance to Terrace Garden Lanes has been boarded up.

Twelve association-sanctioned leagues — made up of 693 bowlers — played at Terrace Garden and now "will need to find a new home," McClain said, as will some of Monroe County's high school league bowlers, who migrated to Terrace Garden after Brighton's Clover Lanes closed in 2016.

Terrace Garden opened in 1958 under private ownership. A Democrat and Chronicle ad from Aug. 28 of that year promoted the facility's 24 "fully automatic" Brunswick bowling lanes, automatic scoring system, sound-proofing, air-conditioning, the "newest non-glare, indirect lighting innovations" and "housewives leagues."

Over the years, Terrace Garden grew in size and hosted a number of major national tournaments and the Lilac City Tournament, among others. During the mid-1960s it was the location for Strike Bonanza, a bowling competition show that aired on WHEC-TV (Channel 10). AMF took over ownership in 1997.

In 1973, Rochester had more bowlers per capita than any other U.S. city, according to a Democrat and Chronicle story published on Jan. 31 of that year. By the mid-1980s, though, bowling was starting to fall on hard times locally, notes a 2017 story. Kodak, Delco and Rochester Products were going through layoffs, and workers who bowled several times a week started cutting back. And nationwide, the number of bowling centers has been declining. From 1998 to 2013, the number dropped by about 26 percent, according to USA Today.

At the same time, a new trend has emerged: upscale bowling centers, which cater to casual, rather than league, bowlers and offer other types of entertainment and gaming, along with high-end food and drink and modern decor. A local textbook local example: Radio Social, opened a year ago by former Clover Lanes owner Dan Morgenstern in the historic Stromberg-Carlson warehouse near ArtisanWorks.