GREEN BAY (NBC 26) — For six months, it was a place where people could knock down bowling pins with a football.
Now, the building located on 301 N. Washington Street in downtown Green Bay where 1st and Bowl was located is vacant.
"I was kind of sad, because I wanted to go there," Miaela Miller of Green Bay said. "But it closed pretty quickly, so I didn't get the chance to."
"I was definitely surprised to see that it's gone," Mark Annarumma of Green Bay said. "I think in the downtown area, yeah, that's kind of one less thing to do."
1st and Bowl shut down just before Memorial Day.
In a Facebook post, the business said in-part, "Our initial 6 month lease is expiring at the end of the month, and due to some difficult circumstances we did not anticipate, we have made the tough call to permanently close."
"We decided that it was not going to be worth it," 1st and Bowl co-owner Bryan MacKenzie said.
1st and Bowl's other location is in Wauwatosa, near Milwaukee.
MacKenzie said after the Green Bay location opened, he found out the business's heating & air conditioning system was not working properly.
"We were probably a little bit ignorant and didn't do any type of testing," MacKenzie said.
MacKenzie said he's not exactly sure why the system wasn't fixed.
But he said HVAC systems are expensive to both repair and replace.
"So, it kind of combined building issue and business being a little bit slower that we had hoped," MacKenzie said. "There was some reluctance to do essentially a complete fix."
NBC 26 has confirmed that the owner of the building at 301 N. Washington St. is Foxconn Technology Group, according to a spokesperson with the company.
The Foxconn spokesperson tells NBC 26 the space is now up for lease again.
NBC 26 reported that in 2018, Foxconn pledged to bring hundreds of jobs when it bought the property.
The Children's Museum of Green Bay used to be where 1st and Bowl was, but it moved to a location on Bay Beach Road in 2019.
As far as 1st and Bowl goes, MacKenzie said they would still like to come back to the Green Bay area.
If it happens, he said 1st and Bowl would most likely move into a different space.
"We're pretty disappointed on how it turned out, and we wish we were still there," MacKenzie said.
