What is Skylanes?
Skylanes is a bowling alley the way Old Town does bowling alleys: two lanes, a 360-degree bar, a DJ booth and a roof that slides open. It sits on the second floor of 7320 E Indian Plaza, above Casa Amigos, in the building that has anchored the Entertainment District since the Axis-Radius years.
Both floors belong to Evening Entertainment Group, the company Les and Diane Corieri have run on this block since the late 1990s. In July 2017 they gutted Livewire, their concert hall in the old Radius half of the complex, and spent about $4 million turning 16,238 square feet into a two-story restaurant and bowling lounge. Alison Victoria, then the host of HGTV’s Kitchen Crashers, designed it; LGE Design Build built it. Casa Amigos and what was then spelled Sky Lanes opened together on January 26, 2018, a month behind the mid-December target.
The pitch was music-centric boutique bowling: retro-modern décor, bottle service late into the night, and a soundtrack of modern pop with 1980s and 1990s throwbacks. What it has become is a private-event room. The official site now calls it “our stylish private event space,” lists no hours, and sends you to event coordinators rather than a host stand. The lanes, the sky-lit bar, the LED wall and the retractable roof are all still there; you just rent them.
Our honest verdict: as a bar you can wander into, Skylanes barely exists, but as a place to put forty people with something to do besides drink, it has no competitor in the district. It is the only bowling in the Entertainment District, and the master list of every bar and club in Scottsdale files it under exactly that.
How to book the room
Decide how much of it you need. Skylanes sells three spaces: the main room around the bar, the patio, and the game area with the two private lanes. You can also take the whole floor. For a bachelor party, a birthday or a company night, the game area is the piece that matters, because the lanes and the games are what people remember; the main room is for the headcount.
Count the toys. Beyond bowling, the room offers up to 12 optional interactive games: pool, darts, basketball, cornhole, boxing, Big Buck and Golden Tee among them. There are 10 HD TVs, a massive LED wall, a DJ booth and a full light and sound system, so a watch party or a DJ set works as well as a bowling night. The roof retracts, which in March and April is the best feature in the building.
Eat here. The floor has a full kitchen and does custom catering, and the events team will build the menu with you. There is no walk-in food menu to study, so ask what they are cooking that season. Drinks run through beverage packages and bottle service, which is how the Corieris have sold this floor since the day it opened.
Use the planners. The site lists its event coordinators by name and phone, including Diane Corieri herself, and the main line is (480) 499-0077. Around the holidays, Evening Entertainment Group has offered a gift card of up to $250 for company-party bookings. For the busy weeks, WM Phoenix Open week and the spring training weekends, book well ahead; the whole block books out.
Finish downstairs. Casa Amigos opens late, Tuesday through Saturday, as a Tulum-styled club with a tequila list, and Bottled Blonde is in the other half of the building. Take a rideshare; parking on Indian Plaza on a weekend night is a lost cause. Our bachelor party guide has the rest of the night mapped.
From Radius to Livewire to the lanes
You can read the whole history of the district in this one building. Axis-Radius opened in 1997 and 1998 and ran until June 29, 2013, sixteen years as the Corieris’ flagship and the reason people drove to Indian Plaza at all. When it closed, Evening Entertainment Group cut it in two. The Axis half became Bottled Blonde in 2014, a pizzeria and beer garden that turns into a club. The Radius half became Livewire, a 14,000-square-foot concert hall that booked Steve Aoki and Joe Jonas and opened in January 2014.
Livewire was the harder sell. A rock room in a district built for DJ nights lasted three years, and in 2017 the Corieris replaced it with a format that covered every hour: a Mexican restaurant to feed the block by day, and bowling upstairs for groups who wanted an activity with their bottle service. “This is a pretty extensive renovation project, so we wanted to partner with the real deal,” Les Corieri said of hiring LGE. Putting a television designer’s name in the announcement was part of the plan too; Victoria had already done the Corieris’ Casa Añejo in Phoenix.
The 2020s tested the model. Casa Amigos and Skylanes closed voluntarily in early summer 2020 as cases rose, and Governor Ducey named Casa Amigos among eight Scottsdale businesses sent final notice by the liquor department. When Maricopa County bars reopened on August 27, state officials shut the pair down again within days for violating protocols. The consent agreements signed that September read like a description of everything the room was built for, forbidden: no dancing, no DJs or live entertainment, no ordering at the bar, masks on, occupancy under 50 percent and logged hourly, closing at 10 p.m. for three weeks and then midnight, plus a $3,000 civil penalty. By early October they were open again.
What came out the other side was a narrower business. Downstairs, Casa dropped its taco menu and became a late-night club. Upstairs, Skylanes stopped pretending to be a bar and became the event floor it had mostly been anyway. That is not a failure so much as the district telling a building what it wants: on Indian Plaza, late nights pay the rent, and a bowling bar with two lanes was never going to live on walk-ins.
Honest assessment: Skylanes is a very good private room with a very good gimmick, and the gimmick is real. If you are a group, it is one of the smartest bookings in Old Town. If you are two people looking to bowl a frame on a Tuesday, it was never for you, and it is not shy about saying so.