Why you should experience Highland Park Bowl in Los Angeles, California.
Highland Park Bowl is a storied entertainment hall where Highland Park's creative character meets Prohibition-era bowling, restored Spanish Revival architecture and decades of independent Los Angeles music.
Set along North Figueroa Street near Avenue 56 and just steps from the historic commercial core of Highland Park, the bowling alley occupies a deep street-facing building within the Arroyo Seco corridor, where the San Rafael Hills rise east of the river channel and the slopes of Mount Washington climb to the southwest. Figueroa follows the lower ground between these ridges before continuing north toward South Pasadena, placing the property along a corridor that developed as one of Northeast Los Angeles's principal commercial spines. The restored Spanish Revival facade opens into an elongated interior beneath exposed bow-truss construction and skylights, with eight lanes extending toward the rear of the building. Original architectural elements share the interior with salvaged bowling components adapted during the twenty-first-century rehabilitation, preserving the scale of the early recreation hall beneath later layers of use. The result is an unusually intact entertainment setting whose long bowling floor, exposed roof structure and position within the Arroyo Seco corridor preserve nearly a century of Highland Park social life.
What you should know about Highland Park Bowl.
Highland Park Bowl is best known for surviving from its 1927 opening to become Los Angeles's oldest operating bowling alley. Prohibition shaped the building's original commercial arrangement: doctors maintained offices upstairs, a pharmacy operated below and patrons carrying prescriptions for medicinal whiskey purchased their alcohol before bowling. A music store formed another component of the property and secured a live-music permit in 1933, the same year national Prohibition ended. Eight bowling lanes occupied the recreation hall, joining drinking, music and sport inside one commercial building on Figueroa Street. The bowling business continued for decades before Italian immigrant Joseph Teresa acquired the property in 1966 and renamed it Mr. T's Bowl. Teresa substantially altered the interior, installing dropped ceilings and wall coverings and painting across earlier architectural finishes. Bowling gradually receded from the business as live performance acquired greater importance, and by the 1990s Mr. T's had developed into a deeply established independent music venue. Punk, hip-hop and alternative performers occupied a room where curtains eventually concealed the lanes, with acts associated with its later history including Beck and the Beastie Boys. Teresa died in 2003, his son continued operating the business and Mr. T's Bowl closed in 2014 after nearly half a century under the family name.
The 2014 acquisition by 1933 Group began an extensive rehabilitation that uncovered substantial portions of the 1927 building beneath alterations installed during the Mr. T's era. Partners Bobby Green, Dimitri Komarov and Dmitry Liberman removed dropped ceilings and interior partitions, exposing the original bow trusses and skylights above the recreation hall. Demolition also uncovered a 1930s forest mural hidden along the rear wall. Workers restored the Spanish Revival facade and rehabilitated all eight bowling lanes, with restoration of each lane costing $30,000. Surviving pinsetter components acquired new uses as chandeliers suspended above the bars, preserving pieces of obsolete bowling machinery within the rebuilt interior. Other objects uncovered during construction were refurbished and returned to display throughout the property. The former music room acquired a stage carrying the Mr. T name, retaining a direct connection with the venue's later performance history after the bowling operation returned. Highland Park Bowl reopened under its original name in April 2016, restoring a recreation use that had nearly disappeared before the building closed two years earlier. The rehabilitation reunited architectural elements from 1927, a mural from the following decade and physical remnants of the bowling machinery inside the same working entertainment hall.
How to fold Highland Park Bowl into your trip.
Highland Park Bowl works as the anchor for a Northeast Los Angeles outing connecting a family stained-glass workshop, a hand-built Arroyo Seco residence and an Episcopal church created within the nineteenth-century settlement of Garvanza.
Begin at Judson Studios, founded in 1897 by painter and educator William Lees Judson and his three sons as a stained-glass enterprise initially operating near the Los Angeles Plaza. William had helped develop USC's College of Fine Arts in Garvanza, and the glassworks moved into the former school property after art instruction transferred to USC's central campus in 1920. Five generations of the Judson family subsequently carried the workshop forward, making it the oldest family-run stained-glass company in the United States and extending its work across traditional stained glass, restoration and contemporary fused-glass collaborations. Continue to Lummis House, where writer, photographer and preservationist Charles Fletcher Lummis began constructing El Alisal in 1897 on a three-acre sycamore grove beside the Arroyo Seco. Lummis used rounded stones gathered from the nearby watercourse and spent 13 years completing the 4,000-square-foot residence, incorporating a river-rock tower, massive wooden doors and windows fitted with glass photographic plates from his travels through the Southwest. The house became a gathering place within the Arroyo arts community before Lummis's death in 1928, linking his domestic architecture with the writers, artists and craftspeople concentrated along the river corridor. Conclude at Church of the Angels, commissioned by Frances Campbell-Johnston as a memorial to her husband, Alexander Robert Campbell-Johnston, after the couple had acquired thousands of acres around Garvanza. Its cornerstone was laid in 1889, and the church was completed that year after a design based on Holmbury St. Mary's Church in Surrey, England. Sandstone, red brick, redwood, stained glass and hand-worked interior furnishings gave the small Episcopal building a highly crafted character, and its congregation retained the church through severe damage to the bell tower during the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. The progression moves from a multigenerational stained-glass workshop through a hand-built residence central to the Arroyo arts community and culminates inside an 1889 church created during Garvanza's early development, joining craft, architecture and artistic production across more than a century of Northeast Los Angeles history.
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