Another piece of blue-collar Seattle is facing the wrecking ball. Leilani Lanes, the tiki-lounge-decored nicotine-encrusted home of bowling in north Seattle, has been sold for $6.25 million, and will close in March 2006. [Seattle Times] In its place will rise… more apartments! Because when you think of the Greenwood-Broadview-Crown Hill metroplex, you think of apartments. And apartments subsiding into the bogs they were built on.

Leilani, of course, is from the blue collar Boeing era of Seattle. You worked at the factory all day, drove home on US 99 (I-5 was still under construction into the mid-60s), grabbed your ball, and headed down to Leilani for bowling league night. See the guys, bowl 200, drink half a dozen Rainiers.

But, forty-five years on, with the Seattle real estate market now set on “so overheated that it’s starting to China Syndrome,” that Seattle, the workingman’s Seattle, has been pushed aside by a white-collar Seattle, of computers and temp jobs and lattes. Blue-collar Seattle is now almost entirely out of the city itself, as traffic and land costs push the warehouses and light-industrial work into the Kent Valley and south, pulling its workforce into the vast tract housing developments in Auburn and Enumclaw and Bonney Lake. And bowling is no longer the booming sport it was in the 1950s and 1960s; the blue-collar workforce tunes in for Seahawks and Mariners games, while the younger, hipper kids choose other participatory sports, usually ones that involve the breaking of bones.

It would be an easy crutch to list all the “stuff that’s gone” and decry this city’s easy demolition of its past. Instead, I would suggest that between now and March you head up Greenwood, drop into Leilani, fill your lungs full of carcinogens, admire the tiki kitsch, drink some cheap beer, buy some pull tabs, and maybe even bowl a game. There aren’t a lot of places left in this city like it.