TIMES Square may soon have a bowling-alley trifecta.

Bowlmor Lanes, the trendy Union Square spot that made rolling balls a blast for the celebrity cocktail jet set, wants to put another set of pins near Shubert Alley.

The area is already home to Leisure Time at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the popular and California-grown Lucky Strike at West 42nd Street and Twelfth Avenue.

Now Bowlmor’s parent, Strike Holdings, wants in on the action. The company already has applied for a liquor license at 229 W. 43rd St., the former New York Times Building.

While Bowlmor’s lease for a staggering 70,000 feet is not yet done, it is in the works and one source advised us, “It’s a matter of days.”

Lon Rubackin, managing partner of GFI Retail Group, which was hired last fall to help Bowlmor expand its nationwide presence, declined to comment, as did Robert K. Futterman of Robert K. Futterman & Associates, who represents the property owned by Africa Israel.

Strike also did not return a call for comment.

There are still no commercial office tenants for the property, which saw its hoped-for lease with Viacom vanish when SL Green renewed the monster tenant at 1515 Broadway.

While Africa Israel previously brought in Asian partners, it’s still under financial pressure to find tenants for the 43rd Street landmark.

The only current tenant is Discovery Times Square, operated by Running Subway, the promoter we reported earlier had rented large portions of the ground floor and lower-level retail.

The building also has leases out with a couple of the national-chain restaurants, sources said, and hotel chains have been looking at the space.

The large floorplates, however, are an issue for any hotel group.

“The fact that we have all these people interested in the building shows there are no financial issues,” said an Africa-Israel executive who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Bowlmor had earlier scouted other Times Square locations, including Vornado’s 1540 Broadway.

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A person closely involved with the construction of the Freedom Tower tells us that it is taking approximately one month to build a floor, and, to date, only token steel has gone up.

Earlier, confidential Port Authority documents predicted concrete work would take no more than one week per floor and called for the building to be completed with a temporary certificate of occupancy on Sept. 19, 2012 — three years from now.

A Port Authority spokeswoman now says the temporary certificate of occupancy will be obtained in mid-2013.

The spokeswoman said the one-floor-a-week schedule for the Freedom Tower will start when the building reaches 200 feet and that it’s currently around 100 feet tall.

Ground level was reached by the south core portion last August, while the north core did so in June.

One reason the work is moving so slowly, a source told Between the Bricks, is that because of the size of the building and floor-load issues, any on-site changes that might otherwise amount to a friendly chat among contractors in a regular project are considerably more involved at the Freedom Tower.

Indeed, the source said a change requires work to be stopped in order to get OKs from the architects and engineers. What’s more, new sets of computerized drawing must be generated.

The PA spokeswoman said an engineer now has been hired to be on site to deal with such issues. She added that the work does not stop to await new drawings.

Since the building is supposed to top off with the 104th above-ground floor, based on a floor-a-month schedule, we estimate that it will take about 8½ more years for the PA to finish the 2.6 million square foot building — around January 2018.

If that wasn’t enough of a shock, after we concluded our back-of-the-envelope calculations, we uncovered a Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center confidential “draft-risk analysis” document from July that shows there is an 80 percent probability that the building will be finished by that very same January 2018.

Tishman Construction, the general contractor, said it was never consulted on the LMCCC guesstimate memo and is sticking to the Port Authority’s 2013 completion deadline, a spokesman said.

On its Web site, the LMCCC states, “According to the Port Authority schedule, the tower is expected to open in the fourth quarter of 2013.”

The groundbreaking was July 4, 2004, and the Web site adds, “Crews have worked steadily since then.”

By contrast, the Burj Dubai tower, nearing completion in the United Arab Emirates as the world’s tallest building with 160 concrete-only floors, started work in 2005 and will very likely open by the end of this year.

Tishman Construction also worked on the 1.7 million square foot 7 World Trade Center that at one point, under Larry Silverstein‘s direction, was completing a floor every four days.

The contractor is also in the last stages of wrapping up the nearby 43-story Goldman Sachs headquarters, which broke ground in December 2006 — around the same time the first beam was installed at the Freedom Tower.

Back in 2007, the PA documents show that by this week they expected concrete to be poured on the deck of the 44th floor, with steel up to floor 53 — the height of 7 World Trade Center — and, get this, predicted a curtain wall would already be slapped as high as the 22nd floor.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed they are able to stick to the latest 2013 schedule, but don’t count on it.

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A 59,000 foot Whole Foods Market opens tomorrow in a new building at 808 Columbus Avenue at West 97th Street that was developed by Larry Gluck‘s Stellar Management, and company officials are bragging that it is going to be the greenest green market in the Northeast.

According to Tristam Coffin, Whole Foods’ green mission specialist, Whole Foods has applied for a LEED rating, a nationally certification program.

Among its green features is a living wall loaded with plants and a roof that has trees and shrubs. It also calls for reduced water usage from bathrooms and the kitchen.

Various woods were either Forest Stewardship Council-certified or came from reclaimed river logs.

In a sign that biotechnology is paving a greener yet lucrative path, signage was constructed from boards made from reclaimed sorghum straw, while biofiber wall panels were derived from wheat fiber and sunflower husks. Plyboo, a new bamboo plywood from China, was also used.

Additionally, the Brooklyn-made IceStone — melded from 100 percent recycled glass and concrete — was used for counters.

“They sparkle all the time,” said Coffin. “It’s nice to know your recycled glass is going to a better purpose than a landfill.” [email protected]