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The Last of Manhattan's Original Video Arcades (nytimes.com)
Video arcades -- those recreational arenas of illuminated screens and 8-bit soundtracks -- have been fading from the cultural landscape since the end of the Donkey Kong '80s. The advent of home video game consoles, hand-held gaming devices and smartphones has all but rendered them relics of a Gen X childhood. Yet somehow, Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center lives on.
From a report: The cramped downtown institution is among the last of the city's old-school arcades, often filled with gamers too young to remember Street Fighter IV a decade ago, let alone Missile Command in the Reagan years. "Chinatown Fair should have closed years ago, along with all the other arcades in the city, due to rising rent and the shift to online gaming," said Kurt Vincent, who directed "The Lost Arcade," a 2016 documentary about the arcade's enduring legacy in the city. "But it's still there on Mott Street after all these years because young people need a place to come together."
Say this about Chinatown Fair: It has been defying the odds for decades. The place opened in the 1940s as an "amusement arcade" in an era when Skee-Ball represented the apex of arcade fun. As youth tastes changed in the ensuing years, so too did Chinatown Fair. The arcade survived the rise and fall of pinball, the rise and fall of Pac-Man, the rise and fall of Super Nintendo, and perhaps most unimaginably, the rise, and rise some more, of Manhattan real estate prices.
Say this about Chinatown Fair: It has been defying the odds for decades. The place opened in the 1940s as an "amusement arcade" in an era when Skee-Ball represented the apex of arcade fun. As youth tastes changed in the ensuing years, so too did Chinatown Fair. The arcade survived the rise and fall of pinball, the rise and fall of Pac-Man, the rise and fall of Super Nintendo, and perhaps most unimaginably, the rise, and rise some more, of Manhattan real estate prices.
I've done repair and upgrade work for Chinatown Fair, there's a lot of things keeping them afloat. For starters, CTF is not the only arcade Lonnie owns, a bad month at CTF doesn't call a death sentence for the whole arcade, and buying and selling games constantly to keep the lineup fresh is something Lonnie is somewhat good at. The location is a bit smaller than I would like if I was opening an arcade but in Manhattan that works to your advantage. You *CAN'T* keep deadweight games in CTF - it's too small. If a game stops making money in another arcade, many operators and owners will hedge on it and be like "Yeah well, we can wait a few months before we think about an upgrade or a replacement." At CTF if a game stops taking in cash, enough to defend it's existence, it's out, within days. Often to another location where it will do well for a while and cover the cost of buying it.
He also does private party rentals (Follow their Facebook page, probably once a week the place is closed to the public) and caters heavily to groups of players who can't get the same experience at home. Music Games, Fighting games, those are big parts of Lonnie's business model at CTF but not so much at his other locations.
And for what it's worth: He's not the only operator in the NYC Area doing this, and doing it well.