A couple weeks ago I decided to start going to and posting about bowling alley’s in and around Peoria and went to Mt. Hawley Airport. The other day I was looking around for a bowling alley to do another post in this series and found that bowling alleys in Peoria are dwindling. There used to be Town and Country, Crossroads, Pleasure Island, Bowl-Mor and a couple others, but they’re all gone. There’s some outside Peoria I plan on hitting, I think there’s two in Pekin and one in Chillicothe, but tonight I thought we’d visit the only other bowling alley I can find in Peoria, Landmark Bowling Center. If you can spare a moment or two, please come along. Let’s roll. Okay, I’m done, let's go.
Here we are at Landmark Plaza, the bowling center is just over there, let's go check it out.
Let's just go through these doors which lead to...
More doors. Wow, this is starting to feel like the introduction to the old TV show, Get Smart!
Okay, we're finally in, here's the front counter and as we learned in our last bowling post, where there's a front counter at a bowling alley...
Bowling shoes can't be far behind. As far as I know, bowling is the only sport where you have to rent ridiculous looking shoes to participate. Kind of a strange ritual that I've never thought about till now.
Landmark has fifty bowling lanes and there's lots of people in here tonight, all of them adorned in funny, clown-like bowling shoes.
Here's a father teaching his daughter how to bowl. Gutter ball in 3, 2, 1...
And here's my soon to be patented "balls to the walls" shot.
There's games to be played in the front of the bowling alley.
There's just one lone Family Guy pinball machine standing nest to an air hockey table in here. Kind of sad and makes me want to revisit Dave Hoover's place again!
This makes me wonder if The Monkees will ever be inducted in here...oh wait, wrong Hall of Fame...never mind.
MBIP contributor, Bob Gordon and I discussed him doing a piece on pay phones in Peoria, as they are disappearing, but we decided a whole post featuring nothing but pay phones would be a little boring, so I decided to take a photo of pay phones whenever I see one. And here's one at Landmark. Okay, this is a little boring, let's move on.
Here's the snack bar at Landmark, which means the real bar can't be far away!
Bingo, here we are! The Bullpen sports bar, I'm not a big fan of sports bars, but I am dying for a beer, so let's go check it out.
Ugh, this is everything I hate in a bar. It's crowded, loud and bright.
And look at the giganzo TV's looming overhead in here. Time to exit, stage left.
On my way out, I happened to see another room attached to this bar, let's see what's in here.
Okay, this is more like it, nice and dark in here and right now it's empty, let's go snag a stool in here.
Here's bartender Joe serving up an ice cold Budweiser.
The view of the back of the bar from my perch.
Check out the Budweiser bowling bar at the other end of the bar.
Here's the taps shot for Spike and I bet that Gene will appreciate that they have Smithwick's in here.
A longshot of the bar.
This window up in front overlooks the bowling alley and bowlers can come up here and order a drink.
While talking with Joe the bartender, I found out that he's an avid bowler and recently won this award for bowling a perfect 300 score game in here. It's the 12th 300 game he's bowled in his life.
He was also awarded this ring for the occasion, pretty cool!
Okay, I gotta go, these Funyuns are making me thirsty. (They didn't have any pretzels.) Sneeze you all tomorrow...and hey...let's be careful out there!
Landmark Bowling Center
3225 N Dries Lane
Peoria
309-685-8200
Further Reading: Bowling 2 U, Insider Pages and facecrack.
