Five Businesses You’d Miss Around The Town

Oh balls! A child’s view of the interior of Jungle Jim’s.

With the welcome return of The Brogue Inn imminent – well, July anyway – we look at other Tralee businesses which have closed down in the past and are sorely missed.

Jungle Jim’s

Many’s a birthday party was celebrated and many a child trampled on, as they swam through a river of multi-coloured plastic balls.

It was a rite of passage the first time you took on the “waterfall” – a behemoth of a slide that was almost 90 degrees in trajectory. If you could tackle that, only then could you say Jungle Jim’s had been conquered.

Children pelting around at breakneck speed with bellies full of fizzy drinks and popcorn. A lethal cocktail that would always end in tears.

Spirals

“Wednesday night is ladies night and Sunday nights the best in gold, so show your face in the place Spirals Nightclub.” The nation reverberated to the sound of that radio advert, but only we could sample its delights on a weekly basis.

Many’s a marriage was made – and a few broken – on the dancefloor.

For some of us, it was our first taste of the nightclub scene; underage and running past Roger on the door, making for the dance floor in attempt to avoid capture and ejection.

The L&A Chipper

After the ‘See Your Face In The Place’ experience of Spirals, there was the ‘Off Your Face In Disgrace’ glamour of the takeaway down the street.

Depending on your state, it was a Michelin-starred, gastronomic delight (ie; langered) or a place of last resort to try to pull before going home alone…again.

The Super Bowl

No, not the over-the-top American Football extravaganza, but the ‘bowling alley’ as it was also plainly titled on Godfrey Place, opposite ‘The Doms’.

The place had a particular aroma – perhaps it was the smell of the shoe spray they used. Not just a bowling alley it also played host to a large collection of arcade games and had that weird science exhibit upstairs – the less said about that the better perhaps.

The Hole in the Wall Bar

During the festival, this was a spot where even sardines would get tetchy about personal space issues.

Strangely, it added to the allure of the venue where for the other 51 weeks of the year played host to talk of milk yields and bull prices from the farmers who frequented the market nearby.

Fittingly, a cattle mart is what it best resembled during the Rose.

Here’s a video of Tralee taken from the air back in 1990 when all those businesses were thriving.