Six Brunswick Lanes at 323 Meridian South — the Puyallup Bowling Center

The sign read BOWLING, one letter above the next, down a tall blade of sheet metal held out over the pavement.

That sign is most of what survives of the Puyallup Bowling Center. There is one photograph — a faded colour print from around 1956, the magenta gone the way old colour prints go, the sky reading deeper than it can really have been. In it the building is a single-storey flat-roofed cream stucco block with a stepped parapet. There is a two-tone light blue and white station wagon at the kerb. The street has two lanes and a painted white edge.

Inside were six Brunswick lanes. The address was 323 Meridian South.

The sign is the reason we wanted to write this down. It has a rounded bullnose top, chunky cream letters on a dark maroon panel, a fluted banded collar beneath the lettering, and it tapers to an angled point at the bottom. Behind it, diagonal and X-pattern steel bracing runs back to the roof, plainly silhouetted against the sky. Nobody builds signs like that now, and almost nobody draws the bracing.

Older than the photograph

Scott Handley, who has looked harder at this than we have, found a reference in Tacoma Bowling News dated 6 August 1951. So the Puyallup Bowling Center was trading at least five years before that picture was taken, and the “circa 1956” on the photograph dates the print, not the business.

What we do not know

We do not know when it closed, who owned it, or what stands at 323 Meridian South today. If you bowled there, tell us and we will put it on this page.

We print South Sound designs in Milton. Ours are in the 253 Gear collection.

The photograph was posted to the Puyallup Valley History Group by Rob Riley in December 2024. Its original photographer is not recorded, and somebody asked in the comments for a proper credit without getting an answer — so if the picture is yours, or you know whose it is, tell us and we will credit it properly. Our thanks to the group.