Farewell to the Coliseum, a place that bowled generations over

There are just two weeks left to get a last strike at the Coliseum, as the long-running entertainment complex, officially known as Leisureplex, closes for good on December 21.

If you ever whiled away a few hours of your youth there, now is your final opportunity for a nostalgic trip back to the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s.

As research for my Christmas shopping column last week, advising people to gift experiences rather than extraneous stuff, I went to the Leisureplex to buy gift vouchers and was surprisingly crestfallen to learn that none were for sale because the place was shutting shop before Christmas.

An era of entertainment and fun is coming to an end on MacCurtain Street as the building makes way for another Premier Inn. Sniff!

The art deco building, which opened originally in 1913 as a cinema, is making way for a generic brick and glass façade.

The now almost windowless Coliseum doesn’t have many architectural fans, but it’s sad to me that a building that was a happy, diversionary destination for so many Corkonians over a hundred years is going to be replaced by a hotel chain.

In an era of streamers and endless movies at a click of a button, going to the cinema is, for most of us, no longer the weekly or bi-weekly event it once was.

During the golden age of cinemas, Cork boasted 12 theatres and pages of nostalgia have been written since about memories of watching classic ‘fillums’ at the Pav, Imperial, Savoy, Lido, Lee, etc.

The Coliseum cinema closed in 1964, became an An Post sorting office for a period, and Leisureplex Coliseum opened in the late 1980s, offering the exciting pursuits of bowling, Quasar laser tag, and arcade games.

For almost 40 years, people have gone to the Coliseum to celebrate birthday parties, work nights out, school outings, and first dates.

So where is the nostalgia for the Leisureplex as this chapter of Cork entertainment closes? Are people sorry to see it go?

It wasn’t a regular haunt for me growing up. I visited occasionally for parties as a child in the 1980s and lurked infrequently as a bored teenager in the ’90s, so I was surprised at how familiar the place was to me, and how affectionately I viewed it, when I returned with my own kids after a two-decade hiatus.

It was a vintage experience. Introducing my children to the ancient art of bowling, I was pleasantly struck at how everything was unchanged.

The seats, bowling balls and lanes were as I remembered. The software that runs the scoring system is copyrighted 1996 - kudos to the software engineer that designed that still-functioning programme!

There are arcade games featuring Rambo and Elvis and the overall air is of stepping back in time three decades. I liked it. For a while.

The cacophony of noisy arcade machines, flashing lights and clattering bowling pins is intolerable after an hour! But my kids loved it and could happily while away hours, and euros, on the various flashing gadgetry.

Maybe that’s why people are not too sad to see it go. It’s not exactly a serene and beautiful place to get wistful about. Through a less forgiving lens, it is a loud, glaring, obnoxious, money-extracting business.

I rummaged around the PeoplesRepublicofCork.com discussion forum, a digital trove of collective Cork memories, for people bemoaning the loss of a space for inter-generational fun, but apart from a few comments about mitching off school and how cheap the arcade games were back in the day, there were few fond reminiscences.

Most friends I mentioned it to shuddered at flashback memories of being there too late after their debs.

Perhaps we’re not sad to see it go because teenage years can be a bit grim and time spent in places like the Coliseum were not particularly special, and therefore were not encoded in our deep memory banks.

Perhaps memories of hanging around because you’d missed the bus, with the pervading smell of greasy pizza, is not worth valuable storage space in our cluttered minds?

However, in my internet-digging, I did find a sweet article in The Echo about a couple celebrating their 2021 wedding date having met originally at the Leisureplex in 1997. Ahh, the Coliseum, where true love stories begin!

There are so few family-friendly entertainment places in the city where fun can happen in an alcohol-free environment, and I was struck at the times I visited by the mix of ages enjoying themselves.

From the very young kids barely able to hold a bowling ball, to the spotty teenagers on awkward first dates, and the corporate teams of all ages and nationalities. It seems a shame to lose a venue with so much untapped cultural potential for the city to create yet more hotel beds.

Of course, change is inevitable. It happens whether we like it or not.

Beloved businesses have come and gone from MacCurtain Street before and will continue to do so again, just as Thompson’s bakery, Hadji Bey Turkish Delight, and Crowley’s Music Centre have slipped into the history books.

And so, we’ll file the Coliseum memories of first strikes, first dates, and first fleeting moments of teenage freedom, and those infuriating slot machines, to the nostalgia region of the brain, and say thank-you to the staff over the years who made the good memories possible.