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In a low-slung gray building on Church Avenue in Kensington, wedged between Dahill Halal Pizza and the Bengla Bazaar minimart, sits Buzz-a-Rama, the last remaining slot-car-racing storefront in the city. Five racetracks fill the room, their eight color-coded lanes turning and dipping and curling around the room like strips of colored taffy.
The space, festooned with checkered racing flags, smells as it probably did when it first opened, in 1965, at the peak of the slot-car-racing craze: of ozone, from the sparks created when a car’s slots don’t connect properly with the track. The old-timers will tell you it’s the same smell produced by electric-train sets, something just as unfamiliar as the slot cars to their successors: the young drivers clustered around the track, small fists on their throttles, mesmerized by the sight before them.
