Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club: Kitsch as hell and knows it

Sandwiched between upscale Park Slope and trendy Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn is a bleak-looking neighbourhood of low-rise industrial buildings called Gowanus. It’s a place that sounds like it should be idyllic, or at the very least desirable – dissected by a canal, a stone’s throw from Manhattan in one direction and Prospect Park in the other, very near the water – and yet it remains stubbornly desolate.

Even the area’s name is somewhat of a letdown: many New Yorkers will tell you it bears the name of a tribe who populated the neighbourhood before European settlers arrived, but further investigation has found that it was probably a useless exonym derived from mistranslation; it may have been named after a Native American called Gauwane, whose given name was mistaken for a tribal moniker.

New York’s strict laws about commercial versus residential buildings means that Gowanus – with its empty, unconverted warehouses humped along strangely quiet streets – hasn’t developed as much as it could have since the owners of those factories moved out. And it doesn’t help that the canal is fenced off with barbed wire in many places, the water a toxic mess of Environmental Agency violations ever since raw sewage was poured into it decades ago (that’s to say nothing of rumours that the canal also served as a notorious mafia dumping ground.)

But anyone who does venture into the potholed streets can be richly rewarded by a smattering of quirky bars, spacious barbecue restaurants, and commercial enterprises that have taken use of the open space. One such establishment is the nationally celebrated Brooklyn Boulders, a climbing gym that began out here among the reconstituted warehouses of Gowanus. Another is the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club, a bar and venue with a name surely better-suited to Floridian retirement communities, which has proved an unexpectedly big hit with the twenty- and thirty-somethings of the borough.

Royal Palms is kitsch as hell and it knows it. The venue shares its premises with an ice-cream parlor and serves cocktails with umbrellas in the height of the snowy New York winter. Visitors can pose in front of a beach background in wigs, holding pink plastic flamingoes, or retire to large booth-style seating to eat tacos or pizzas from the food trucks parked outside.

The main event, though, is the large open space below which has been converted into 10 shuffleboard courts. The courts can be hired by groups by the hour, and the game is simple with almost no physical exertion required: simply take a long stick and push the disks along the court to try to score points. It is, essentially, boules with a slightly more complicated scoring system.

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There is something delightfully all-American and retro about acting like an 80-year-old in a southern state among 25-five-year-olds in New York City. Royal Palms is a place where people come to be seen, but only ironically. There are few dedicated hipsters here; instead, the crowd skews “people from wholesome American towns who kinda-sorta miss it” and “flamboyantly dressed Hawaiian shirt-lovers who want to pose beside gigantic connect-fours”.

If you can get past the “I’m quirky, me” vibe and settle in for some good, clean fun, you can end up having the time of your life. And if you’d rather take your shuffleboard seriously, thank you very much, then they run a genuine league as well, which I’m reliably informed gets competitive.