HERE’S the Fei Long Market on 8th Avenue between 63rd and 64th Street. If you’re of a certain age you recall 8th Avenue and 64th Street for the 2001 Odyssey disco depicted in the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever.” I recall this neighborhood for many things; as a kid my father and I would go watch the soccer matches at what was euphemistically referred to as Dust Bowl Park, part of the Lief Ericson Park corridor, on 8th Avenue and 65th Street. For many years, I took in a weekly meal at Zeke’s Roast Beef, at 8th Avenue and 66th Street, before heading to my night job at Photo Lettering in midtown.
For decades, though, the Fei Long Market building was the site of Bay Ridge Lanes, a misnomer if you ask me, as I consider the boundary line of Bay Ridge and Sunset Park to be 65th Street. Close enough, I suppose. I was a bowler as a youth, beginning at age ten in 1967. I belonged in a grade school league at Leemark, on 88th Street between 4th and 5th and later, a high school league at Greenpoint Bowl, and finally, a league in my college years way out in Sheepshead Bay, Rainbow at Knapp Street and Avenue X. (I didn’t drive and would stagger in at 2 AM on a school night when I took a bus and two subways to get home from there). I was never a good bowler as I never mastered a hook and heaved the ball down the middle. I never got my average over 150.
As for Bay Ridge Lanes, I was in there in the early 1980s with a girl named Marianne. Neither of us drove so I don’t recall how we got there from my house on 73rd Street and 7th Avenue. All I remember was a thick haze of smoke within. This was before smoking was banned from most indoor spaces. Bay Ridge Lanes closed shortly thereafter, and all the lanes I mentioned above closed long ago, too. Sick transit, Gloria!
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11/21/24
3 comments
I played many a baseball game at the Dust Bowl back in the 60’s. Wasn’t there a burger joint across 8th Ave back then, too?
Zeke’s Roast Beef, 1970s-2010?
In the early 90’s, there was also a batting cage on 8th Avenue on the other side of the tracks at the corner of 61st street. As for bowling, Maple Lanes was my spot. 16th Avenue & 60th Street.