If you’ve been following this site, you may have heard me mention that one of my dreams has been to open a retro-arcade-type place in my area here in Louisiana. In the many years I’ve been collecting and working on games (which in the big picture, I admit is a small period compared to many others in this field), my collection has grown. One of the things I really enjoy is sharing it with others who appreciate the games.
What started as a game or two has now ballooned into almost 40 working machines, spread across different locations. I’m not alone. There is a small cadre of local collectors in the area like me and we’ve been meeting and discussing for some time, the notion of putting our collections together into some kind of mega-arcade that we all can enjoy.
Some of us have operated games on location; some of us have been regularly approached by club owners wanting us to put our machines in their bars. The problem is, there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of that: it just isn’t profitable. If arcades were profitable, they’d still be around. And games in bars get trashed and are high maintenance. As a bar owner, pinballs may be cool if you have the room, but as a pinball owner, its an expensive proposition to take one of your “babies” and stick it in a caustic environment. On top of that, the laws on the books are very unfriendly to old-style coin-op and make licensing them a losing proposition. So games end up in peoples houses, which is a good thing, but not always easy to share.
So for the last few years my buddies and I have been joking about “getting a place”. It’s one of those things most people dream about but don’t really have the guts to do, and we’d occasionally drive around the city checking spots out and going, “Hey that would make a great place..” but then when you realize the crazy rent it would cost, the idea quickly fades. Plus none of us are in a position to quit our day jobs and make no money manning a retro arcade. What is there to do? Is there any way to have our cake and eat it too?
One day I was driving around a local neighborhood and I spied an interesting building… an old church, abandoned since Katrina, orphaned and alone, nestled down a side street in a very nice and safe neighborhood, flanked by an eclectic mix of single-family homes and apartments. I thought, “Wow what a perfect place for an arcade…”
What other application would work out so well in an otherwise nondescript, windowless one-story structure? It was about this time another friend of mine started to take an active interest in my retro-arcade idea. If it was just up to me, it would be an idle thought that I’d later dismiss as “crazy” but my friend Weston, was very supportive. His excitement and willingness to help make this more than a dream rekindled my enthusiasm and I started thinking more seriously about whether or not something like this could really be done?
Unfortunately none of us are rich. So it all depends upon the property. To pull this off we have to be able operate at a very low overhead so that there isn’t a ton of pressure for us to deliver in a short period of time or burn out. We needed a stable, safe, secure place to launch this project. That’s a pretty tall order when you don’t really have any money…
So anyway, I kept thinking about this church. It had been sitting there for years. It wasn’t for sale. Who owned it? What was the deal? Well, when I mentioned this to Weston, he immediately kicked into action and launched a CSI-style investigation into what was up with the property. I was so impressed that I realized with friends like this, maybe it’s not an impossible dream? Maybe we can collectively work together and come up with an arcade? And within a short period of time, we had all kinds of details on the property, it’s former and present owners and everything in between. But was it for sale? No, but with some quick work here and there, we managed to approach the owners and see if they were interested in working a deal.
As it turned out, they had been trying to turn the property back into a church. Originally built in the 1960s, probably before any of the other buildings were around, the original congregation that had the church disbanded after Hurricane Katrina swept their parishioners across the country. The church took on about two feet of water and was left for dead for years. They dumped the property several years later on a minister from Peurto Rico who wanted to revive the structure but ran into one pitfall after another, and so for 7+ years, the building sat, empty. Would they consider selling? Yes. We arranged for a tour of the property…
This old building had definitely seen better days. It was completely gutted, but from the moment I stepped inside I could almost hear and see the sounds of what it would be like to fill this place with pinballs. I don’t know why but it was in itself, a religious experience. Architecturally, the place was perfect. Not too big, not too small, plenty of space, and nice and solid and secure.
For the last few months a small group of us have been pouring over the property, inspecting, researching, negotiating, etc. and every step along the way I’ve been asking myself, “Are you crazy Mike? Look at this place? It needs so much work!”
I still entertained the idea, but unfortunately no banks would lend money on this property. In its current state it was of no interest or use to them. I talked to more banks than I can even count and each one of them acted real interested at first, but then blew me off when they realized what I wanted to do. About this time I had made my last payment on my main house it was suggested I take out a second mortgage and pick up the property. Hmmm. About this time my mother called. She’s Mrs. Conservative, she’d never condone such an irresponsible action. So I bounced the idea off of her, “Hey mom, I’m thinking of buying this abandoned church and turning it into a pinball club.” She said, “That sounds like fun.” I was like, “What? You’re supposed to tell me that’s crazy.”
I think my mom started to realize, hey, you only live once… why not go for it? It was a lesson I myself was trying to re-learn. So…. why not? Can it be done? I started crunching the numbers and realized we could probably pull this thing off.. it would quite a big risk with me mortgaging my home, but it wouldn’t be that bad. I could probably handle getting the property. The big problem is, can we get it renovated and habitable? What’s wrong with it? How bad can it be?
This is where we discovered what the owners ran into… all kinds of red tape regarding code enforcement and permits and stuff. Since the power had been off for so long and the walls had been opened up to mitigate the Katrina damage, the local ordinance says all the electrical has to be brought up to modern code, which ended up translating into all new wiring. I brought in some plumbers to inspect the drain lines – we had problems there too.. nothing super bad like under the slab, but issues where the front of the property needs to be dug up to fix some cracked and blocked pipes. Oh no…. But on the plus side, the building is structurally sound, good roof, very level slab, framing is solid… just a few issues, but not trivial ones
So we formed a group a local pinball club and begin assessing what resources we had… AC and general contractors in the group? Legal services? Check. Electricians? No. Plumbers with heavy equipment? No. But a skeleton crewe of us have decided it’s worth trying to do. Are we crazy? We just might be. But WHAT IF? What if we took this old, abandoned, Katrina-damaged church and turned it into a really cool pinball club?
What do you think? Are we out of our minds? Our group is willing to bust our butts to renovate it and get it going. We’re just concerned about whether we can raise the extra funds to cover some of the big things like re-wiring the electrical and fixing the drainage. I’ve got a deal where we can acquire the property and I’ll put down the money to secure it, but it doesn’t leave a whole lot left for renovation, and therein is our issue. Do we go for it or not?
The building is beautifully laid out. Half of it is wide open for a large area. The other half is broken down into different rooms we can set up for exhibits or smaller groups of games. There’s a wide-open area in the rear where we can create a really awesome workshop and have room for two large workbenches along the wall, tools and everything else – we could even have an area for clear-coating playfields and bead blasting. It could be the ultimate arcade+repair place, and we’d have the whole thing completely wired with high speed internet and cameras so we could share what’s going on with everyone in the community even if they weren’t physically there. So that’s the idea we were thinking of. Take several of our collections, house them in a private club and make them available to member and friends on a regular basis. Kind of like PAPA but maybe more than twice a year, and anyone who comes into town and wants to visit, chances are we’d be happy to have them visit. What do you think? Is this doable?
Our local group has a pretty impressive array of games… we anticipate at least 100 machines, including some very rare and one-off exhibits.. spanning everything from the 1930s to a WOZ that with any luck, the folks from JJP would show up to help us celebrate unboxing…. That’s our dream. Maybe I need a bit of a reality check… because this property is ours if we want it and I have to decide… are we doing this?
