Just down the hill from where the city’s longtime hospital building was recently wiped away, another Bremerton icon from a different era is being erased.
Demolition began Monday on former Bay Bowl, a bowling alley built more than 80 years ago that operated on Lower Wheaton Way just south of Harrison Hospital for decades. A hub when the sport was central to social life in Kitsap County, the property being cleared is now slated as a major part of the potential for the Sheridan Park neighborhood’s future.
No one had rolled a ball inside old brick building, built in 1942 as a movie theater for military families, for more than a decade, according to former building owner Chris Campana. And outside of a brief period around 2014 when a Thai restaurant operated out of what was once the alley’s lobby , the building sat unused save for graffiti artists displaying their work and opinions on its large brick facades and extended bays, its former neon letters vertically spelling “B-A-Y” having been stripped away years before…