00:00Hey, what up, AD? You're with Chris Paul. Welcome to Highland Park Bowl.
00:25I first came to Los Angeles December 2011. I've been here about 14 years. This is the only home
00:33that my kids have known. And at this point in my life, I couldn't imagine being anywhere else.
00:38The reason we are here at Highland Park Bowl is because this has been a love of mine for
00:45majority of my life. My dad was in bowling leagues. So I spent a lot of my childhood in the
00:51bowling
00:51alley. That was a lot of our Tuesdays or Friday nights when my dad was in a bowling league. And
00:56so naturally, just like any other kid, me and my brother gravitated to bowling.
01:02This bowling alley here, Highland Park, what makes it so special and different is the authenticity.
01:08There are so many different bowling alleys now where you can go and it's the lights and it's
01:13all this different type of stuff. But it's just the rawness of this bowling alley here. It gives
01:18me a lot of thought of the bowling alley that I grew up with.
01:22The history of this bowling alley, it's such a unique story. We have to go back to 1927. If you
01:29think about that era, it's the midst of prohibition. There was a company called the Highland Park
01:35Drug Company, and they owned a couple of pharmacies. And so they realized that there's a lucrative
01:41business selling prescription alcohol. So they come up with this crazy idea to build a space
01:48that they can put a pharmacy in to sell their alcohol, but also put doctor's offices upstairs
01:55where they could prescribe the alcohol and then put a bowling alley in the back. So it's
02:00a one stop shop for doctor, pharmacy, get your whiskey and go bowling.
02:06When I used to come here when it was Mr. T's Bowl, starting in the late 80s through the 90s,
02:11it was just a live music venue and a bar. And it felt actually really small and dark because
02:18they had the ceiling drop down really low. They had a curtain that blocked all the bowling
02:23lanes. So you didn't really see that. And that was it. So I never knew how big and grand
02:28the space was until we really started digging into it to find how incredibly grand it is.
02:36The day that we came in to look at the space and do a kind of our exploratory of what's
02:42behind
02:42all the remodels throughout the years, I started popping up ceiling panels. I can see this incredible
02:48wooden bow truss ceiling that was way up there. And as we started going behind curtains and walls,
02:56I can see this mural painted on the back wall of a forest. So it got me so super excited
03:02to tear
03:04all the years of remodeling away and get this space back to the way it was built in 1927.
03:10And that's what we inevitably did.
03:18Being here in L.A., you don't know who you're going to see when you go to the bowling alley.
03:22I think a lot of times when I go bowling, people are surprised to see me there. I remember when
03:27I first started doing my bowling event, that's when I found out Nelly was a big bowler. You know, we
03:32had Lil Wayne in our bowling event. Kay Hart was in it one year. French Montana. You just realize that
03:39bowling
03:40bowling really is a connector because there are a lot of people who have moved to L.A. from other
03:44places just like me and my family. But what I've been able to do is you sort of find your
03:49community. You find your people.
03:53I think it's very nostalgic when you're in here. This ball return, which is amazing. You can actually see everything
03:59that's happening. When you go to most bowling alleys, there's a huge cover over this. I look at this and
04:05I'll be like, oh, this is where my great granddad and my granddad used to bowl.
04:14The same time I discovered this mural, I see these incredible machines. And these machines were from 1948, which was
04:22the first year that the mechanical machine came out. Before that, it was human pin setters. Over the years since
04:28we've been open, I've met two guys that are now in their 80s who worked here as kids as human
04:34pin setters.
04:35So my first thought was we have to show off these machines and not cover them. We met with a
04:41bowling company, Brunswick, and we said, hey, can you restore these machines?
04:46They looked at the machines. They said, you know, these machines are so badly damaged and they've been robbed from
04:53parts over the years that you really can't restore these exact machines.
04:58But we have the exact machines, but in good shape and we'll swap them out. As a designer, I never
05:05like to throw anything good and vintage away.
05:09So we pulled the eight machines out before they put the new machines in and we dismantled the machine.
05:16And I just started looking at the parts thinking, how can we reuse these parts?
05:20And so when you walk around the place, you see the chandeliers we made out of four pin setters.
05:25The wheels on the back wall were part of the machine that picked up the pins and so we displayed
05:30those and motorized them.
05:33The shelving behind the bar was just kind of the framework of those machines.
05:37We're able to recycle pretty much every bit of the machine back into the space.
05:41Even the old pins, I took a bunch of the pins and I cut them in half and then I
05:45hollowed out the bottom and I turned it upside down and made little table lamps out of them.
05:50You know, part of my mission in the hospitality industry has really just been to save as many of these
05:55great places as we can, save them for another generation.
05:59You know, a pass on the torch of old L.A. because old L.A. is so cool.
06:04Highland Park is a very old L.A. neighborhood.
06:07This building was Spanish Revival, although I didn't know that until we tore the facade off of it.
06:13Sometime I would say in the 60s or 70s, a lot of L.A. did, they would modernize the building
06:21and so they covered the entire facade with like kind of a geometric metal panel.
06:26But we were able to find one incredible photo of the front of the space, Highland Park Bowl, in the
06:33early 60s before they had changed it.
06:35And you could see that it was a beautiful Spanish Revival space with arched windows upstairs.
06:41And so the decision was made to tear off that metal facade and bring it back to what it was.
06:49This is what L.A. is about.
06:51The good thing about L.A. is it always rebounds.
06:53It always comes back because we have so much to be thankful for here.
06:58I live in Altadena.
07:00And obviously, as many people know, that was one of the big fire areas.
07:04The fire was in my backyard.
07:07It had burned through the entire city and our entire community.
07:10It was gone.
07:11And we're still just climbing out of the ashes.
07:16How would I describe the spirit of Los Angeles?
07:20I would say resilient.
07:22In the time that I've been here, the city's been through a lot of different things.
07:26And as of late, it was the fires.
07:30So to see the way people come together, not caring where you're from,
07:35whether or not you're a transplant or whatnot.
07:37And I see the way that people really and truly care about each other.
07:40And whatever you need, they'll be there for you.
07:43In the days after the fire, it was very community coming together a lot,
07:49figuring out what people need, finding it.
07:51We did a drive here for everything from food to blankets to whatever anyone wanted to drop off.
07:59I feel like everybody was doing that, you know?
08:01We're now 11 months after the fire, and that's still happening.
08:13One of the things that I noticed as I got older is that the bowling alley, it didn't have an
08:20age group.
08:21It didn't have a gender.
08:23It didn't have anything.
08:25Everyone was sort of just welcome in the bowling alley.
08:28And I think that's what I've always appreciated about it, is that it's a game that's a connector.
08:34It just allows me to relax and be with my people.
08:37When I go bowling, it's almost like I just get to be a kid all over again, right?
08:42And to have kids of my own and to see the way that they sort of gravitated towards bowling and
08:47my wife.
08:48Bowling for me is just sort of that getaway from everything else that's going on.
08:53Over 14 years, what has LA come to mean to me?
08:58It's my second home.
08:59I have such an extended family here in LA that at this point in my life, I couldn't imagine being
09:05anywhere else.
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