A church. A mini-storage business. A hurricane evacuation shelter. A live music venue. A physical therapy location with a pool addition.
All of these ideas—and even more—have been proposed for the former Metro Bowl location at 4388 Airline Hwy., which closed about two years ago.
“It’s just amazing, because we’ve had a lot of interest from people with a lot of different ideas for it—and we’ve had a number of purchase agreements on it—but I just don’t know why none of them have closed,” says Grey Hammett of Mike Falgoust & Associates, the listing broker for the property.
Hammett has been marketing the property, which includes the roughly 40,000-square-foot bowling alley facility located on about 4.3 acres, for about a year and a half.
“I usually don’t carry inventory this long,” says Hammett, adding that a new price reduction should spur even further interest in the property.
Originally listed at nearly $1.25 million, the property was just reduced to $850,000 by the seller, Malco Theatres, says Hammett.
“The land alone is worth that,” he says. “Really, I could probably sell the land easier than I could the building.”
When it finally sells, about the only thing the former Metro Bowl location likely won’t be, interestingly enough, is a bowling alley.
“The lanes have been sold off,” says Hammett. “But the brick building is in good shape. It’s heated and air conditioned, and it includes a restaurant and plenty of bathrooms. So there’s a lot of options there.”
The property is zoned M-1, which as Hammett describes it, “allows for just about anything you want to do commercially.”
Hammett says the interested buyer who wanted to convert it into a storage center ultimately didn’t like the location. Financing has been a problem for those who would like to turn it into a church. And the prospective buyer who wanted to turn it into a live music venue turned out to be “a scammer,” Hammett says. In his latest effort to sell the property, Hammett says he has reached out to nursing home operators in the three-state region to pitch it to them.
When the 40-lane bowling alley closed on May 31, 2013, it had just celebrated the 54th anniversary of its grand opening on May 18, 1959.
“She’s a great old lady, and she needs a home,” says Hammett. “Somebody is going to get a great deal on her.”
—Steve Sanoski
