Bowling Doesn't Have to Be a Lonely Pastime

Welcome to our weekly CityLab newsletter. Sign up here to get it every Friday in your inbox and send us your feedback. Today, bowling enthusiast David Dudley riffs on a new HBO docuseries: Ask an urban policy expert about bowling and you'll probably hear something about the work of social scientist Robert Putnam, whose 2000 book Bowling Alone coined a useful shorthand phrase for the worrisome decline of community-building institutions and places. The collapse of league rosters since the 1970s, Putnam proposed, signaled a broader retreat from civic participation, an idea that continues to resonate in the current discourse about an "epidemic" of loneliness in the US. But ask me about bowling and I'm going to talk about bowling. Specifically, the 265 game I rolled in 2005, or maybe the league championship I shared that year, or that time I strung together 11 strikes in a row across two games, or ... wait, come back! Luckily, the recent release of the HBO docuseries Born to Bowl offered a rare opportunity to legitimately combine my interests in urban development and Brooklyn strikes. Bowling is a deeply cityfied sport: It boomed in the US as the nation urbanized in the 20th century, followed Americans into the suburbs after World War II, and then foundered when sprawl and screentime turned us into whatever we are now. So mighty was the tenpin game in its heyday that it spun off distinct regional variants, like Baltimore's duckpin bowling and the candlepin of New England, which cling to life in their respective redoubts. The cities I've lived in were full of places to bowl, many now gone. But while bowling's historic footprint has diminished, it remains, perhaps surprisingly, an extremely popular activity, with about 50 or 60 million people rolling at least one game every year in the US. And as Putnam's critics have pointed out, they are rarely alone. The game morphed from being a weekly commitment into an occasional opportunity to blow off steam and eat wings; we've lost some of the unifying power of this most democratic of pastimes, and its most serious practitioners lost the perch they briefly held at the very pinnacle of professional sports. Bowling itself, however, rolls on. More on CityLab Sprawl Is Out Among the findings of a new study from Johns Hopkins University: Places with sprawl may have lower housing costs, but higher transportation and energy prices can more than overtake those savings. The metro area around Stamford, Connecticut, shows how even quintessential suburban areas can reverse bad patterns. Driverless Transit Is In Outside the US, self-driving trains are becoming a standard for urban rail. Washington, DC, could be the first to get the US on board. Spotted Lanternflies Are Around If you're in the northeastern US, brace for swarms of the gorgeous migrants from parts of Asia. 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