Will Leilani bowling-pin sign ever be spared?

The Leilani Lanes bowling pin — all 2,000 pounds of it — is headed for that eternal alley in the sky unless the rusted, cracked sign finds a home soon.

A demolition crew knocked over the 20-foot pin a week ago after razing the old Leilani Lanes bowling alley in Greenwood. The alley, a Seattle icon that opened in 1961 and closed last year, is going the way of several notable haunts being redeveloped for apartments and commercial space.

If no one turns up to save the sign within 10 days, the head of the demolition crew said he plans to turn the bowling-pin sign into scrap metal.

Scott Lewis, an architect who lives nearby, never bowled at Leilani Lanes, but he said he worries Seattle is losing its funky charm and history in the frenzy of redevelopment.

"The ideal scenario would be integrating the sign into the new apartments to maintain a sense of place," Lewis said. The apartment developer, Michael Mastro, couldn't be reached for comment Friday.

That was the case with the landmark Wonder Bread sign that stood atop the Central District bakery for 50 years. The sign is being refurbished and will get a new life atop the Pratt Park Apartments, which are expected to open next year on the old bakery's site at 18th Avenue South and South Jackson Street.

Lewis said another option would be installing the bowling pin sign in a park or some other gathering place in Greenwood. Several years ago, the Georgetown Community Council saved the Hat 'n' Boots — a 44-foot-wide cowboy hat and two 22-foot-high boots — from an old gas station and moved them to a park.

The Leilani Lanes bowling-pin sign is the latest relic of Seattle's past that could be headed for the junkyard. Several old haunts and their familiar signs along Aurora Avenue, such as the Bridge Motel and the Twin Tepees Restaurant, are being replaced.

Long before the age of Global Positioning System devices and Google Maps, at the dawn of television as a mass medium, these huge three-dimensional signs, many of them neon, were commercial totem poles for fragile consumer memories, contributing to their neighborhoods' landscape and character.

"Seattle's commercial signs offer great ways to explore our shared past," said historian Lorraine McConaghy of the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI), which has a growing collection of historic Seattle signs.

Lewis said he contacted MOHAI about giving refuge to the Leilani bowling pin sign, but the museum doesn't have the space. McConaghy said that MOHAI encourages such inquiries and gets far more offers of old signs than it can accept.

Besides the well-known Rainier Brewery "R" from 1950, other signs on display in MOHAI's galleries include a 1936 sign from the Great Northern Railway, the provocative Kidd Valley Burger Babe from 1971 and a 1933 mural — "All Roads Lead to the Dog House" — from the Dog House restaurant, which closed in 1994.

"These signs are important," McConaghy said. "They're great popular art, sure, but they also are great cultural and economic history."

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com