For a generation of New Yorkers, the arcade was a basement on Broadway or a back room at the bowling alley, a place a parent was happy to know nothing about. Round1, the Osaka-born amusement chain, has a different idea, and as of Oct. 17 it has about 80,000 square feet on the third floor of the Shops at Skyview in Flushing to prove it.
The new venue, at 131-07 40th Road, opened with a 9:45 a.m. ribbon-cutting, according to QNS, which counted more than 250 arcade and crane games, many of them Japan-exclusive titles, along with 17 bowling lanes, private karaoke rooms, eight billiards tables, four ping-pong tables and, in a concession to the decade’s sporting mania, a pickleball court. The Queens Economic Development Corporation, which announced the opening in advance, put the floor area at 79,695 square feet.
The pitch: an afternoon, not a purchase
The language from the principals was what one would expect, and also revealing. “We are excited to keep expanding the Round1 experience and bring a new entertainment destination to the Queens community,” Akira Ide, Round1’s president and chief executive in the United States, said in the company’s announcement. “Round1 is committed to delivering high-quality spaces and moments for shared experiences, and our new location at the Shops at Skyview reflects our continued efforts in creating a place that brings smiles and everyday fun for everyone, everywhere.”
The landlord was equally enthusiastic. Skyview is owned by Acadia Realty Trust, the publicly traded shopping-center REIT, and its senior marketing manager, Wesley Sin, framed the arrival as a cultural rather than a retail event. “The Shops at Skyview has continued to position itself as a unique cultural hub in Queens, one of the most culturally diverse boroughs in the country, and we are excited to welcome Round1 to the center,” Sin said. “Round1 brings a distinctive mix of Japanese gaming, animation and interactive entertainment culture to this vibrant community, while also providing a safe and engaging environment for visitors of all ages to gather, play and connect.”
Read past the boilerplate and the strategy is plain. American malls have spent fifteen years learning that the internet sells shirts more efficiently than they do. What the internet cannot sell is an evening of bowling with one’s cousins, and so the industry has been filling its largest boxes with what the trade calls experiential tenants: climbing gyms, trampoline parks, golf simulators and, increasingly, Round1.
A chain on a tear
Round1 is not a cautious company. It now operates some 60 venues in the United States, and on Oct. 10, a week before Flushing opened, it unveiled something more ambitious in Ventura, California: the YUU Japanese Food Hall, a collection of 14 restaurants brought over from Japan, according to a Business Wire announcement. Food halls and arcades are not obviously the same business, but they share an underlying wager, that a landlord with a dead anchor box will trade generous terms for foot traffic, and that foot traffic will follow anything that feels like a trip to Tokyo.
Flushing is a natural test. The neighborhood’s center of gravity has long been the corner of Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue, where the 7 train empties into one of the busiest pedestrian intersections in the city, and Skyview, a short walk west, was built to catch some of that flow. The center’s anchors, big-box retailers of the kind every developer wanted when it was built, now share the complex with a growing roster of tenants meant to keep people lingering. A Japanese-owned amusement company offering anime-themed crane games is, in the context of a neighborhood with deep East Asian roots, a fairly obvious fit.
The case for skepticism
There is a reasonable counterargument, and it deserves its strongest form. Entertainment tenants are expensive to build out, and they live or die on repeat visits; the national landscape is littered with trampoline parks and family-entertainment centers that opened to lines and closed to silence. Arcades also bring a particular set of neighborhood worries, about crowds of teenagers, about late hours and about the security burden on a mall that sits beside a busy transit hub. Sin’s emphasis on a “safe and engaging environment for visitors of all ages” reads, in part, as an answer to that concern before anyone has raised it.
The rejoinder is that Round1 has been doing this for decades, in Japan and in American malls across the country, and that its model, a mix of low-ticket games and higher-ticket bowling and karaoke, is built for exactly the kind of mixed crowd Flushing produces: families on Saturday afternoons, students on weeknights, birthday parties all year.
Meanwhile, on 37th Avenue
The arcade is not the only new reason to come downtown. A few blocks east, The Bay, an oyster and wine bar at 133-44 37th Avenue from the team behind W&T Seafood, has been drawing notices, including a review in The Infatuation, for bringing raw-bar sophistication to a neighborhood better known for hand-pulled noodles and soup dumplings. And the Tangram complex on 39th Avenue offers a food hall of its own.
Taken together, they suggest a downtown Flushing increasingly confident that it can be a destination as well as a crossroads, a place people travel to on the 7 and the Long Island Rail Road, rather than merely through. Whether the third floor of Skyview is still bowling in ten years is a question for Round1’s accountants. For now, the crane machines on the third floor are open for business.
Featured image: The Shops at Skyview in Flushing, where Round1 opened on the third floor on Oct. 17. Photo: Kidfly182 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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