Virginal. Untouched. Pristine vintage beauty clad in Howard-Johnson's-Blue, linoleum and lacquer. This is the alley time forgot. A museum quality preservation of an earlier, simpler age of bowling. This is how your grandma used to bowl.

Be warned, there are a few dings in the veneer. The alleys are a slow, despite recent refinishing. There's no bar and you will, occasionally encounter students who are only there in an attempt to get phys ed credit without sweating. Oh but Western Lanes has so much to give to those willing to look past these small flaws. There's the restaurant, for example, with it's dark-as-my-soul stained captain's chairs and plasma red sticky sweet cherry crushes. They only hire the kind of waitress who calls you "sugar" and means it, though you'll likely have to wrest her away from a tiny ancient television to find out. This, indeed, is bowling the way it was always meant to be.

But before giving Western Lanes its final rating, one must take note of a couple of bonus areas...

1. Western Lanes has its own homemade jingle on the radio sung loosely to the tune of "Rawhide": "Bowlin' Bowlin' Bowlin'/Western Lanes has bowlin'/Toward the pins we're rollin'/Collide!" More goth points would have been registered could they have arranged to have it performed by Christian Death or oh...perhaps even Cocteau Twins, but if not necessarily goth, the DIY attitude is undeniably punk rock.
2. Nothing says class like a chandelier in the restroom.