Change of Face: Downtown fixture is getting fixed up

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

By Laura Giovanelli
JOURNAL REPORTER for the Winston-Salem Journal

It was newsworthy in 1978 when Pete Bambalis installed a women's bathroom at his pool hall on Fourth Street in downtown Winston-Salem. So imagine the uproar when Recreation Billiards' rusted-out sign, a 59-year-old weathered shade of red, came down two weeks ago.

"We're closed for a few weeks," Bambalis shouted into the bar phone over the clang of a ladder.


Outside, two men took putty knives to the thick black paint, scraping time off the wooden facade like archaeologists on a dig.

This bar, the embodiment of a downtown blue-collar watering hole - with a jar of pickled eggs on the bar top and men in dirt-caked work boots nursing Budweisers - is getting the unthinkable.

A facelift.
Four pool tables are now ghostly shrouds, covered with tarps and tools, work gloves, paint brushes, faded billiard balls, a can of WD-40 and a dusty jar of Mt. Olive dill pickles that used to sit on the bar. The "Cold Beer to Go" case will go. The vintage cash register won't. The heating and cooling workers came last week, so on humid summer nights, the pool hall's version of central air will be more than propping open the front door to the hot street.

The window in the front door, busted out years ago and replaced by green-painted plywood, will be back. A replica will replace the old sign - the original brought inside, hung up and lighted with some track lighting against the now-exposed brick walls.

There will be fresh paint, new bar stools (red mahogany and padded!), and a Web site, www.recreationbilliards.com.

"The best things in life never change," the Web site reads. "They just get better."

"We ain't going anywhere, and we ain't changing anything," Pete Bambalis told the Winston-Salem Journal in 2003. "This is a working man's country club," he would declare.

Two years later, his son, George Bambalis, persuaded his cousin, Tom Dombalis, to sit outside with him. From a bench on Fourth Street, the cousins watched nighttime pedestrian traffic along Fourth Street, and, Dombalis said, some of them looked as though they lived downtown, or at least nearby.

Those nights made a believer of Dombalis. On a weeknight, he saw people walking dogs, pouring into the microbrewery down the street and out of the Stevens Center after shows.

They walked right on by Recreation Billiards.

"A lot of people wouldn't venture in," George Bambalis said last week. "Obviously you've got a building that at first glance appeared to be old and dilapidated, and that kind of made people feel uncomfortable."

It was time to renovate, the men agreed.

The family says it is putting $40,000 to $50,000 into the pool hall and hope to reopen this spring, luring some of the younger barflies who typically gravitate toward wine bars.

Regulars are welcome to come back, too.

Whether they will is another matter.

"You can't be all things to all people,"George Bambalis said. "Not everyone will feel comfortable with the changes."

The younger Bambalis is 46 to his father's 81, and like his father, has seen many promises for downtown come and go since his grandfather opened Recreation Billiards in 1947.

What's different this time, George Bambalis says, is that people are moving downtown - actually buying the new condos and renting the renovated apartments.

"You see, downtown is changing," George Bambalis said.


- Courtesy of the Winston-Salem Journal

In the Archives...

July 6, 2006, Relish Page 5, "Recreation Billiards Wears Its New Face Very Well"

February 15, 2006, Page A1, "Change of Face / Downtown Fixture Is Getting Fixed Up"

December 25, 2003: Relish Page 32, "Recreation Billiards Remains True to Its Character(s)"

June 25, 2000: Page D1, "Community Pool / Recreation Billiards Has Survived in the Same Place on Fourth Street Since It Was Opened After WWII"

April 1, 1990: "Saving Facades in Downtown / Program Helps Improve Appearance of Businesses"

Jan. 14, 1986: "At Recreation Billiards, 'It's Like One Big Family."

Sentinel, June 6, 1983: "It's Recreation / But Pool Hall's Owner Wonders How It'll Fit In."

From the Sentinel (afternoon paper at the time): July 6, 1978: "A Sign of the Times / 'Gals' races New Door at Poolroom"

April 14, 1974: "Changes Come Slowly to City's Pool Halls"

July 9, 1972: "Pool Hall Veteran 'Loves Game'"