It is a nasty, rainy Thursday evening in Chicago, but inside Dave and Buster’s on Clark Street near Oak, the neon is blazing and the adrenaline is crackling.
At the moment, a group is drinking designer beer and eating “gourmet” pizza, served up by waitresses with white shirts, red bow ties and black skirts, and the revelers are taking on “The 19th Hole” ($25 an hour after 5 o’clock), one of those high-tech games where you can play a simulated round of golf and the computer tells you how far you smacked it, or didn’t smack it, into the screen. The one woman in the foursome has just hit her tee shot-on a 382-yard, par-4 hole-a total of 31. That’s 31 feet. Another Bass Ale, please.
In the dining room, patrons are choosing from an ambitious menu on which entrees range from “mesquite peppered rib-eye steak” to “penne pasta with marinara.” Close by, others have occupied every one of the 12 pool tables as well as four bowling lanes, although the shuffleboard tables remain vacant. At the 40-foot-long Midway Bar, some guy is actually reading a book. Hey, pal, the Harold Washington Library is on South State Street.
But most of the action tonight in this 60,000-square-foot establishment is in the Million Dollar Midway, a sprawling assembly of various electronic games. Right now, two men with those creepy wraparound gizmos over their eyes are heavy into “Virtuality” ($4 for four minutes), twisting their bodies awkwardly as they blast away at peripatetic, nefarious figures in a game entitled “Zone Hunter”-prompting a sign to flash “Weapon Upgrade.” At the finish, a friend comes up and gleefully shows off a plastic bow-and-arrow he has won as a result of collecting coupons in house-chips-operated games (three for $1, credit cards welcome and, for your utmost convenience, check out the ATM right near the front door).
There are rules. “No soiled work clothes . . . All gentlemen must remove their hats after 4:30 p.m . . . Loud and/or abusive language not tolerated . . . No Snuff or Chewing Tobacco.”
With everything from Skeeball to stand-up comedy, karaoke to coupon-triggered prizes (750 for boxer shorts, 30,000 for a Zenith TV!), the place is a blend of county fair and Great America, but with none of the seedy charm of a Riverview. Like Disney World, this is Sanitary City. Controlled environment.
Some have characterized Dave and Buster’s as “a Chuck E. Cheese for grown-ups.” Decidedly, there is a similarity, but with a strictly enforced limited-kids policy, this is basically a place for adults. In other words, if Chuck E. Cheese is the Happy Meal, Dave and Buster’s is the Arch Deluxe.
Segue now to a Tuesday night and pull up to North Beach, a complex that opened in 1992 in a onetime etching company building on Sheffield, just south of North Avenue. It features not only four bowling lanes, two basketball courts and pool tables, but its showcase attraction-three volleyball courts filled with 300 tons of sand trucked in from the Indiana Dunes. It is about 9:30; pitchers of beer are flowing; the air hockey machine is getting a workout; and the inevitable music-some of it shockingly retro (“GLO-REE-AH!”)-is blaring. And on the three courts, where some 130 teams play each week, 24 people in T-shirts, shorts and bare feet are playing on four-person co-ed teams as they go for “kills” and dive for balls in sand 16 inches deep.
On the main court, teams of friends who most likely have played together on the actual North Avenue Beach on warm summer nights and weekends are battling it out in an “advanced” league. Which means that the games are no-nonsense, as heated words occasionally are exchanged among teammates between games. After one point, a long-haired young man messes up a shot and disgustedly punches a nearby rock. Actually, it is not a rock at all, but part of a large, court-flanking mural that also includes a tropical-motif depiction of waterfalls, palm trees and mountains, as well as, incongruously, the Chicago skyline. At the end of the court there is even a replication of a thatched roof. This may not be Barbados, but for a chilly fall night in Chicago, it will do just fine.
North Beach and Dave and Buster’s are two representatives of what, for lack of a better term, may be categorized as adult entertainment centers, although there are those, such as Dave Corriveau (the Dave) who think “adult entertainment” has salacious connotations. Which couldn’t be further from the truth. These clean, well-lighted places are about as scurrilous and sinister as an “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” sing-a-long. The Brady Bunch goes bowling! Some would say these games centers are perfect (maybe pathetic) playgrounds for Peter Pans and, well, Panettes, who don’t want to grow up. Others would say, hey, these people work hard and Social Security won’t even be around for them, so why shouldn’t they have fun now?
The spots seem to have started arriving in the late ’80s and early ’90s, although a hard-charging early contender went belly up. Half a dozen years ago, Chicago was alerted to the coming of Billy Lee’s, a 65,000-square-foot entertainment complex on Fulton Street in the River West area. There was even a press preview, and excited talk about bumper boats navigating in 30 inches of water on a lake in the basement and go-karts racing around a 16,000-square-foot course, not to mention the four bars and three restaurants and computerized golf and pool and video games and batting cages. Billy Lee’s, it seemed, had everything-except city licenses to operate all its attractions. It opened briefly, then was shut down, never to reopen.
The Cue Club, on Sheffield just north of Diversey, opened about the same time. Decidedly, this is not your father’s pool hall. It is one of several up-scale places that are a far cry from the joints where Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman battled it out. If he had been old enough to get past the door, Beaver Cleaver would have felt right at home here, although that rat Eddie Haskell probably would have cheated by not keeping both feet on the floor. What do you say in places like this-“7-ball in the corner fern”?
“Lots of people from the neighborhood come here-professionals, pretty people-and pretty people like to talk to other pretty people,” says Jim Mayrose, a bartender at The Cue Club, which is located in a former shoe factory. “Playing pool is a social activity. Rather than having to think of two hours’ worth of small talk, it’s a good thing to do on a date in the colder weather. In the summer, you get the serious pool players. Mostly men.”
Neighborhood people obviously can walk into The Cue Club-10 tables, along with occasional bands and stand-up comics in the back room-and be pretty assured that they won’t get seriously hustled (that is, in the poolroom sense).
“You know,” says Mayrose, “the old-time pool halls have a kind of-how can I say this?-aura hanging around them. Our local people feel more comfortable here. A guy came in the other day, and I just knew he was looking for a game. I could tell by his look. He took a table way over in the corner and I watched him and I knew. He came over to have a drink at the bar and I just told him: ‘You’re not going to find a game here. I’m the best player in the place at the moment, and you’d kick my butt.’ A short time later, he got up and left.”
“The old image of a pool hall was always something a little more dangerous, a place where you could get your thumbs broken,” says Chris Quinn, managing partner of The Lucky Strike on Lincoln Avenue near Diversey, which offers billiards as well as bowling. “Here, it’s more like a young kid out of college on a date.
“I think it’s interesting that pool and bowling have made a comeback. When I was growing up, I never thought of going out and playing pool. The only chance I had to play was if a friend’s father had a table in his rec room. And when you think of bowling alleys, you think of these huge places with 36 lanes and real good bowlers in leagues. Our bowlers here are, well . . . they’re not about to go out on the pro tour. But they’re not intimidated to come in here. They just want to have fun, and if they don’t bowl well, they may take home the score sheet as a kind of joke.”
Most of these adult entertainment centers are found in the city, scattered around the Near North and Mid-North areas. Many solicit corporate parties and do a brisker business as the weather grows crummier. Other commonalities are that the customers are mostly in their 20s and 30s and that the centers offer more than one activity, a well-stocked and trendy bar, thumping music and tight (but not Nazi-like) security. They also have a no-kids policy or limited-kids policy that sets hours when the under-21 set is welcome-sort of like when the lifeguard at a pool blows the whistle for “adult swim” time. Except that here, kids have to be accompanied by a parent or guardian-a teenager’s ultimate nightmare.
Places in the suburbs, such as the Poplar Creek Sports Center in Hoffman Estates and the Ultimate Sports Dome in Aurora, are much more friendly toward kids and are geared toward sports per se-hold the Jagermeister-with indoor soccer, field hockey and softball layouts and the like. But in 1995 Dave and Buster’s kicked off a location in Addison, on Swift Road near I-355 and Lake Street, and the owners of North Beach plan to open another place in Downers Grove in mid-December in a shopping center just east of I-355 on Butterfield Road.
A good case study in this entertainment evolution process is Southport Lanes & Billiards, 3325 N. Southport, housed in a building that was built in 1922 by the Schlitz Brewing Co. It was known as Leo’s Southport Lanes when my wife and I and our friends started going there years ago-a homey, blue-collar, pre-yuppie neighborhood kind of place, with honest-to-God pin boys (still in place, but now probably called pin persons). Ferns aside, in the sense of Real Chicago botany, it was more of a tree-of-heaven bar. And Leo himself presided over the proceedings as a kind of avuncular prison warden. One year, we helped put on a New Year’s Eve party in the plain, spacious room that is now filled with upscale pool tables-and even invited a slew of sports writers. (Bad idea.) We knew things had changed a few years ago, when we were invited to a surprise birthday party there for a guy who worked in a Michigan Avenue ad agency, for pete’s sake.
It all seems to be part of an evolving trend and changing images. Even Las Vegas, long known for laundering money and taking people to the cleaners, is becoming one of the country’s top family destinations. For the last decade or so, we have heard about “comfort food.” Now we have, in effect, comfort entertainment.
Looking at theme restaurants like Planet Hollywood and the Rainforest Cafe (with locations in Chicago and Schaumburg, respectively), marketing experts have dubbed them “armored cocoons” because of their secure, controlled environments. Amusements centers would seem to fall into that niche, and Karen Oertley, publisher and editor-in-chief of Amusement Business Magazine, agrees.
“These places make it easier for people to go out,” she says from her Nashville office, “because it’s a predictable and safe environment, and they’re comfortable with that.
“I also think they’re almost enthralled with the new technologies that are waiting for them there. There’s a lot of newness to it, and they like that. Then, everything that’s old is new again. The billiards thing and the martini bars and the cigar smoking. There’s kind of a resurgence. Yes, a kind of throwback to the ‘Thin Man’ movies of the ’30s and ’40s. For some reason, I think they associate that with the security, safety.”
Academics (of course) have reflected on this burgeoning sociological scene. “I think there’s two factors at work here,” observes Jack Nachbar, professor of popular culture at the Bowling Green University (Ohio) Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
“One thing is, we put a tremendous amount of emphasis in this culture on youth and the idea of remaining young-from the multibillion-dollar plastic surgery industry on down. It’s considered kind of shameful to be old, and it’s considered so vital and wonderful to be young that you make virtually any sacrifice. So it comes as no surprise, then, that the emphasis on having a facility in which to be childlike is something people would look on as fun. I mean, it’s not that the people who go to these places don’t realize they’re adults, but the idea of having at least a little regression entertainment probably fits within a cultural ethic in which youth is seen as the best time of life.
Secondly, these are relatively younger people who are doing this, and what we’ve been into is the postponement of adulthood for the last generation or two. Kids go to college; a lot of them go to graduate school; a lot are moving back in with parents; and their marriage age has gone way up. So the acceptance of what we define as traditional adult responsibility is coming on later and later in this culture, especially amongst the affluent.
“If you watch (the NBC sitcom) ‘Friends,’ you know they have that little foosball game in the guys’ apartment, and they have those two chairs where they can just watch stupid game shows on TV. It’s part of that same syndrome-that the metaphor of our culture is that you postpone adulthood as long as you can.”
Waiting to take on Virtuality at Dave and Buster’s with his wife, Kathy, George Enguita, 44, an investor from Mokena, says people enjoy places like this because they “like to compete, challenge their skills. You have a hard day at work, I’ll tell you what-this releases the stress. I also like the fact that kids aren’t here.”
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Phil Smith, 35, who is in sales, says he had been introduced to Dave and Buster’s three weeks earlier and is back for the third time. “I’ve been coming ever since my local Chuck E. Cheese closed,” he joked. “Seriously, though, it’s a comfortable place especially for those in their late 20s, early 30s. People are just tired of clubs. And how many times can you go to a bar and watch some college game on ESPN? A lot of this here is fluff, but at least you can bowl and have dinner. We’re about to play that virtual-reality golf. There’s everything under one roof. You can come here with a friend you haven’t seen for a while, instead of riding around from bar to bar. I do think, though, they could have more of a variety of games, more pinball and things. Take out some of the novelty items. It’s too much of an arcade. Make it a lot more adult. But I do like the fact that there aren’t kids here. Absolutely. I mean, it’s bad enough that I’m here.”
“When you think about what there’s to do for the over-21 set, besides going to a movie or dinner, there isn’t much,” says Corriveau, president and co-CEO of Dave and Buster’s. (“I’m the fun-and-games guy; Buster is the food-and-beverage guy.”) But at Dave and Buster’s, there’s more to do than eat, drink or stare at your date.”
“Adults can come in and act like kids,” says Tracey Visser, manager of the Dave and Buster’s on the Near North Side. “We see the men in their business suits and ties and they’re all wrapped up in the driving games like Daytona USA and Ace Driver. There’s a release-a kind of escapism for them.”
Based in Dallas, Dave and Buster’s has rolled out eight locations across the country, including Atlanta, Philadelphia and Hollywood, Fla., and has plans for new ones in Maryland, southern California, upstate New York and Denver. Under a license agreement with Bass PLC, they also plan to open seven complexes in the United Kingdom by 2000, starting with London early next year.
It all began in the late 1970s, with two side-by-side locations in Little Rock, Ark. One was Buster’s, a restaurant owned by James (Buster) Corley, and the other was Slick Willy’s World of Entertainment, offering games, hot dogs and popcorn. Corriveau claims that he thought up “Slick Willy” before it became a pejorative nickname for Bill Clinton. “But, you know, he used to be a customer there.” Corriveau says.
“Dave and Buster’s is similar to a Las Vegas casino, if you think about it,” adds Corriveau, who years ago dealt blackjack in that Nevada town. “It has the roar of the crowd; it has people who are doing interactive things. Now, it doesn’t cost as much per customer as a casino, but they can still have the thrills that come with a night out.”
Owners of local Chicago entertainment centers are, not surprisingly, entrepreneur types who segued from other lines of work. Their ranks include a couple of traders on the Merc and a Quaker Oats alumnus.
“My partner, Fred Barofsky, and I were real estate developers in the suburbs,” Bradd O’Brien says of North Beach. “We got into indoor sports by way of the Poplar Creek Sports Center, an indoor tennis building converted to soccer in Hoffman Estates, and that led us to thinking, hey, volleyball is a hot thing on the lakefront. Let’s go see if we can find a warehouse building and throw some sand in it.”
Originally, the partners hired professional volleyball players to manage the place, which turned out to be a bomb. “They lasted about a month,” O’Brien says, grinning. “They didn’t quite have the business acumen, to say the least.”
He sees the sports at North Beach as providing a conversational ice-breaker (as in, one supposes, “Do you come here often to stuff the ball down someone’s throat?”).
“The whole theme behind North Beach is that we don’t want people standing around, feeling like they have to talk to somebody. So if a corporate party comes here or a group or a league, it’s a social crutch, in a way, to have these activities. Plus, Chicago has a very large volleyball community now. North Avenue Beach has 70, 80 courts. The sport has caught fire here. The professional tournaments’ being on television helps, too, of course.”
“It’s nice to be in here, especially when there’s snow on the ground,” says Shawn Cardwell, a 30-year-old technical service representative. “You know, sometimes you get into a game so much, you see the palm tree and waterfall murals out of the corner of your eye and you actually feel you’re not playing in a Chicago winter but in the tropics.”
Chris Quinn, managing partner of The Lucky Strike-which is operated by Spare Time Incorporated, also owners of Southport Lanes-says: “I think about the 19th Century German beer gardens where people went out and sat at tables and didn’t feel the need to get smashed but just have a good time. You can do that here.”
On an early Tuesday evening, a private party from a law firm is occupying four of the eight bowling lanes at The Lucky Strike, located on the former site of an Italian restaurant and a dinner theater and also home to six pool tables, two bars and a striking Art Deco marquee and decor. In another room, a beer company rep is giving “a beer discovery”-i.e., a lecture about beer, including the history of brewing. (“Can you imagine that in an old-timey bowling place?” someone marvels.)
Two other lanes are being used by three men and one woman who work at a carpet company. They are eating items from the menu, which includes fried calamari and chicken/spinach/ red pepper sandwiches-not exactly your standard Slim Jims-and-pretzels bowling alley fare.
“People like this place because you don’t have the top bowlers-you know, the guys in the leagues with those gloves,” says Alex Yu, 25, who is in commercial carpet sales. Later, this group is replaced by a dozen or so employees of Helene Curtis, all decked out in ghastly-colored bowling shirts. “They bought them for us,” one says sheepishly. “And they made us wear them.”
At The Lucky Strike, for one, families are welcome to come in afternoons, but are strongly encouraged to clear out by prime time. You’re under 21? Bring a parent or guardian, kiddo. At The Cue Club, you have to be 21 to get in, and the age range mostly goes up to about 35. North Beach allows some kids’ parties, but they have to be during the day. After 7 p.m., the age range is 24, 25 and up, the easier to deal with ID cards.
At Dave and Buster’s, the age policy is spelled out in detail on printed cards available near the entrance. Noting that D&B’s is “primarily an adult establishment,” the policy states that persons under 21 will not be admitted unless accompanied by a parent or legal guardian; that one parent must accompany every three children under 16 and one parent per every four minors when one or more is 16 or over; that there be no unattended minors; that those under 21 must stay with their parent at all times; and that all minors must leave the premises by 10 p.m. during the school year and 11 p.m. during summer recess, unless seated in the dining room. Whew.
The policy apparently has received mixed notices. Says one no-nonsense pool player who wandered in for a matinee game: “I think Dave and Buster’s has too many rug rats. At least they did the afternoon I was there. I take pool too seriously for kids to be around.”
But when a Wheaton mother wrote to Mike Royko earlier this year, complaining of the rules that reduced one of her daughters to tears, the Tribune columnist sided with the house as being “reasonable and prudent.”
“Even old-fashioned, friendly neighborhood taverns have always had their own informal policies regarding children, which usually includes not bringing along too many little buggers and making sure they don’t cry, screech, require diaper changes on the bar, use foul language or otherwise disturb the serious drinkers,” Royko wrote. “In fact, if I were running a place the size of Dave and Buster’s, where kids could get lost and have to be hunted down . . . I might require that all children under the age of 12 be required to wear dog collars around their necks attached to 8-foot leashes held by responsible adults.”
Says Corriveau: “We have some strong house policies that we enforce. Kids can get rambunctious, and it’s just not a good thing. We also do special things to make sure we continue to cater to the adult clientele. For instance, we have all the latest and greatest interactive entertainment gizmos known to man. What we’ll do, we’ll take games and put touches on them. An example is the Manx TT motorcycle game, which costs about $75,000. Actually, when it comes to you, it doesn’t have padded seats-just regular ol’ seats, you know. Well, we’ll put padded seats on it for one reason: Adults like padded seats.”
Another reason grown-ups like the place, he adds, is that they don’t have to compete alongside hot-shot hand-and-eye-coordinated teenagers on the point-and-zap games.
“That’s probably true,” says Bowling Green’s Nachbar. “But they also want to have fun amongst themselves. And if a little kid’s right next to them in the game room, it’s going to make what they’re doing seem infantile.”
Corriveau says there are other adult entertainment centers that would like to compete with Dave and Buster’s: “For instance, Blockbuster opened up its Block Party in Indianapolis and Albuquerque. That’s an attempt to copy us-an attempt. To really do it right, it’s a $10 million investment. And it’s hard to get to that level. There’s talk of Disney entering this business and talk of Dreamworks-Steven Spielberg. Now, Buster and I are flattered that Spielberg or Disney want to step up to our level. Well, it’s a big country. There’s plenty of room. And maybe we can learn something from them.”
“I certainly think there is a trend, but I also think there’s going to have to be a mix of bars and entertainment centers,” says Oertley of Amusement Business Magazine. “I just got back from Myrtle Beach (S.C.), where they have a group of bars and restaurants in an area. I think an entertainment center would be the type of facility that would fit right in.”
“There’s definitely a trend developing,” says O’Brien. “I see these places growing in number. Now, I don’t want to see them grow too fast! You know, I’d like to get a few more Beaches open before the trend gets really nutty. The good thing about our concept, now that we’re going into our fourth year, is that volleyball is big. Its growth parallels the desires of people and what they want to do socially now. In other words, if it was just sort of an adult entertainment center with some goofy concept, it would have lasted only a certain period of time.
“I mean, the overall trend has got to be this way. People are just active. They don’t want to go out and stand there all night and suck down martinis and talk trash.”
Of course, there is always the danger, in this age of short attention spans and instant gratification, that the young people will move on to something else. Picking up his bowling ball at The Lucky Strike, Alex Yu had remarked, “You get tired after you go to Dave and Buster’s once. I think the only reason you’d go back is if you have any chips left over.” However, mid-40ish Corriveau, for one, denies it’s all a passing fancy: “When we go into a market, we sincerely plan on being there through my lifetime-and I hope I have another 50 years left.”
But who knows what’s next? Sand bowling? Virtual-reality Go Fish?
So what’s the meaning of all this? Is it, as Professor Nachbar has suggested, a communal desperation to remain young? Is it that a couple of generations reared on the passivity of television and the isolation of computers are dying for some hands-on, raise-a-reasonable-sweat kind of social activity? And, if so, does it have to be so planned, so laid out, so prescribed-so tidy? For that matter, whatever happened to-as Kup used to call it every week on late-night TV-the lively art of conversation?
There is, decidedly, something about these places that is disturbingly homogenous: “It feels so good to be here, Kevin. These people are just like us!” If Riverview and the old pool halls were tacky in a dusty, edge-of-danger sort of way, these places seem to effuse a by-the-numbers sterility, blandness and climate-controlled caution. Build-your-own Biospheres, with Absolut Kurant and mozzarella sticks at the ready. And you don’t even have to talk to your date.
But enough of this. Move to the bottom line. There is, simply, no denying the popularity of these entertainment centers. Throw in some sand, and they will come.
“It really is nice in here,” says Tiffany Cardwell, an ebullient 28-year-old international human resources rep, taking a look around North Beach. “There’s no wind, no freezing cold air. People want to play volleyball all year round, but they also have good drinks and food and music. There’s a little bit of everything. And everyone gets along really well.”
Meanwhile, back at Dave and Buster’s, the virtually real golfers and actual bowlers and pool players are still going at it, while in the Million Dollar Midway, four guys are frantically trying to throw footballs through a round hole (“long pass”) and a square one (“short pass”) in something called UB QB. One misses consistently, and gets joshed by his buddies. That finished, they order something else on tap and move on to Hoops, where the same poor soul misses his basketball tosses, bringing more jeers, and then it’s on to Ace Driver, where they heatedly compete against each other in cars with names like Red Lightning and Yellow Cyclone.
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Close by, three women are seated in a large room trying their hand at a space simulator, “Galaxian 3-The Final Mission: Destroy ‘Cannon Seed.’ ” They’re screaming excitedly as they blast vehicles from the sky (“All right. All right!”) but groan in unison at the finale as a sign informs them, “Mission Unsuccessful.”
Failure or not, it seems the night itself has been a success, as it has been at North Beach, The Lucky Strike and The Cue Club. And, best of all, there’s not a kid in sight.
Aren’t we-virtually-having fun?