The only kind worth mentioning.
Back in the early nineties I stumbled onto a place in a fairly new shopping center. Clean, almost antiseptic. Beautiful new tables, furniture, decorations, everything. It was well lighted, seemed like an ideal family recreation center although I don't know if young people were allowed in the place. I walked through there looking at the many tables and such and thinking "Wow, this is what a pool room needs to be to put pool back on the map!" I didn't have time to play the day I passed through but planned to get back over there soon to give the place a try. Never could quite persuade myself to go back though, the place had no soul.
Nasty pool rooms are where I am at home. Even in the sixties and early seventies I didn't care if they were black or white, or how rough they were, if there was action to be had I was home. Nick's Steak House was the first place. Probably ten footers had long ago replaced the tables and chairs to eat on which were still piled in the back of the room. There was a small bar in the front that just catered to the hardcore alcoholics that didn't care how dismal a place was as long as the drinks and beer were cheap. Seventy-five cents for a mixed drink best I recall, maybe sixty. The cavern in the back where the pool tables were at was dank and dark with the only light coming when a bulb was turned on over a pool table. Usually it was dark when I went back there, maybe one or two other tables in play on a "busy night" for pool. A very rough place in a very rough area and it was pretty filthy besides, nasty in all respects. I was rolled in the first few months I went there and had the bloodiest battle I ever had over a pool table shortly afterwards. A week later I was back in Nick's playing pool every night and nobody saw fit to even mention the earlier incident. Somebody staggered in badly cut up one night and fell by the bar. After people got tired of walking around him they finally drug him over by a wall. Few people came through the door that weren't at least triple my age but it was the first of many rougher places I called home.
There was a place around LSU, dirty and old and in a basement. The smell and the constantly damp concrete made it a nasty place to play, the inhabitants were pretty mellow. You gave the rackman a dime to rack and often a nickel tip. Giving him a quarter for the rack and tip combined was either being flashy or a fool with your money.
Shoppers I have talked about recently in another thread. Old, run down, with a leaky roof that could never be fixed successfully, the smell and cleanliness of the place made it borderline nasty. The people in there were rough but all understood you didn't crap in your own nest. The counter people could usually count on a crowd of back-up if anything seemed likely to start. Once Jessie took over that wasn't needed, Jessie was a crowd all by himself.
The H&H Club was another nasty place. an old tarpaper covered building mostly on blocks, it might have once been a home. Filthy, uncared for, and a rough country place.
Greenway in that day was a short step above any of these places, later if fell into total decay itself and the last time I rambled in it was a mausoleum, just a few hardcore drinkers or loafers at the bar, nobody playing pool although the tables were all still there, obviously long neglected though.
Tee Neg's on the bayou, The End of the World where the road ended at the intracoastal canal, Hopkins Landing, some places not having or needing a name and many more with the names long forgotten, all interesting places. A biker bar in BR with pool tables and a whole new level of nastiness, the barmaids wanted to lock up and play on the tables when my partner and I came in on a slow day.
Similar places in Augusta and Atlanta Georgia, all over the gulf coast states, were home when I walked through the door. Just something about the feel and smell of an old pool room, I think I would always know where I was at if I was blindfolded and led through the door of an old "real" pool hall anywhere in the country. Most of these I remember from the sixties and seventies, a few in the early eighties. There are a few still around but they get scarcer by the year. Whitey's in Metairie is one of the survivors, Buffalo Billiards nearby is a newish pool hall in an old building with a long term pool room owner operating it. It has the old time pool room feel and flavor yet manages to operate and even thrive with a modern nut. Maybe there is still hope.
Somehow playing in the nice antiseptic places just doesn't have the same appeal. I would think that something more like family centers or places resembling bowling alleys hold out the best hopes of a future for pool's commercial survival but a "real" pool hall has to have an atmosphere of long faded glory and a faint smell of age, old cigar smoke, and this and that odor that can't quite be traced. Without flavor, character, characters, or history a pool hall has no soul and I feel like a stranger. A lot of different meanings to "nasty" but a place that isn't at least a little bit nasty just isn't a pool hall.
Hu
