When her father died in 2013 she took over the business now that it’s closed, she says she’ll focus on playing golf. Today she is regarded one of the greatest female players of all time. His daughter, Jean, could play a mean game by the age of four, standing on milk crates to reach the table at 13 she became the youngest person to win the US Open pool championship, a title she went on to defend for six straight years. Hall of Fame began when Albert Balukas, a Lithuanian immigrant who was merely average at pool, purchased and renovated an old bowling alley on Ovington Avenue. “It’s like the United Nations in here,” Alex Rodrigues said. Inevitably this led to tension, most of all during the fraught years after 9/11, but Hall of Fame kept pace with the changing demographics of the neighborhood. Fifth Avenue, just around the corner, has become predominantly Arabic, with 24-hour hookah lounges and baklava shops, while Sunset Park, to the north, has become New York’s biggest Chinatown. Bay Ridge was once home largely to working-class white families - Irish, Scandinavians, Italians, Greeks - but more recently attracted immigrants from Latin America and the Middle East. The pool hall became known, over the decades, as something rare in this part of Brooklyn: a place for people from different backgrounds to meet.
Above the cash register was a more recent handwritten sign: NO VAPING.
The price list was on one of those magnetic boards with white type that have become ubiquitous in hipster coffee shops. Behind her at the cash register were dozens of photos, many faded and with crinkled edges - generations of regulars, visiting pros, a dog named Snooker who used to hang around the place. People stamped their feet as they came in from the cold. It was a weekend night before the place closed. “Gives me chills to think about the history,” said Sue Monte, who first began working at Hall of Fame in the 1970s and returned a few years ago to run the counter, handing out racks of balls to customers and flicking the old mechanical switches that light up each table. This week, after months of limbo, a handwritten note appeared in the window: “Thank you for 56 years! It’s been fun!” The building went on sale agents managing the property said it would likely be redeveloped.
Rising taxes and a decline in business had steadily caught up with a venue that opened in 1964 and became a Brooklyn institution, a place where children learned to play pool and returned with their own children. The basement area, once thronging with players and the thud of pool balls, had been shut for years, with half its Brunswick tables already sold. “It’s kinda dead.”įewer than half the tables upstairs were occupied. “But look at this place now,” said veteran employee Alejandro Rodrigues, or Alex, on a recent Friday evening. Both floors of Hall of Fame Billiards, a cavernous pool hall in Bay Ridge, would be packed. In the past it could take 30 minutes to get a table on weekends, the queue snaking outside or crowding the entrance on winter nights.
0 kommentar(er)
