Additional Fitness Competition Fills East Town Mall's Last Big Vacancy

• VASA Fitness opens its fourth Wisconsin club on August 15 at 2430 E. Mason Street, the former Shopko that sat empty for seven years.
• The 58,000-square-foot club is expected to create about 70 jobs and puts a second national gym chain within a two-minute walk of an existing Planet Fitness.
• The opening caps a slow turnaround for the surrounding East Town Mall property, which survived a Ponzi scheme scandal, receivership, and years of empty storefronts before developers started filling it back in.
• VASA is backed by a Denver-area private equity firm and has quietly become one of the country's largest gym chains.

VASA Fitness opens its newest club on Saturday, August 15, in the building that used to house Shopko at 2430 E. Mason Street.¹ It's the company's 73rd location nationwide and its fourth in Wisconsin, joining clubs in Racine, New Berlin, and, just three months ago, Menasha.² The 58,000-square-foot facility claims it is expected to create around 70 local jobs and comes stocked with a three-lane pool, a half basketball court, and an indoor cold plunge, on top of the usual weight room and cardio floor.³ Memberships start at $14.99 a month.³

"[Green Bay is] a community that values hard work, family and living an active lifestyle."
— Michael Osanloo, VASA Fitness CEO

The building has a longer story than the gym moving into it. It opened as a Shopko in July 1989, in the city where Shopko itself was headquartered until the chain collapsed into bankruptcy in 2019 and closed every store at once, including this one.⁴,⁵ The 105,923-square-foot box sat empty next to East Town Mall for roughly seven years.⁶ VASA's lease covers a little more than half of it.

A Slow Comeback for East Town

East Town Mall next door has had a rougher few decades than most Green Bay shoppers probably remember. It opened in 1982 as the city's first fully enclosed mall, lost its original Prange Way anchor to bankruptcy in the mid-1990s, and spent much of the 2010s better known for its ownership scandal than its stores.⁷ Massachusetts regulators accused the mall's former owner of running a Ponzi scheme that drained more than $9 million from local investors, many of them retirees who had each put in $213,000 for a small ownership stake.⁷ The mall landed in receivership before Lexington Realty International and Case Equity Partners bought it in 2016.⁷ We reached out to local leaders to get their thoughts on the new development.

"VASA coming to Green Bay is another sign of our community’s economic strength and growing commitment to healthy living. As someone who enjoys lifting, I’m excited to see more fitness options for the public and more businesses choosing to invest in Green Bay.”
— Rep. Amaad Rivera-Wagner, WI Assembly 90

The real turnaround started in 2021, when local developer Garritt Bader bought part of the property and began converting it from an indoor mall into an open-air power center, the kind where stores face the parking lot instead of a food court.⁸ Cousins Subs, Chipotle, and Shoreline Credit Union all moved into the redeveloped corridor over the following years.⁹ So did Planet Fitness, which took over part of the old mall interior in the fall of 2021.⁸ VASA's arrival, five years later, fills one of the last big vacant boxes left on the property.

Who's Actually Behind VASA

VASA isn't the local firm the press release's language might suggest. It started in 1996 as a Gold's Gym franchise operator in Utah, and in 2014 the private equity firm Silver Oak Services Partners bought in and relaunched the brand as VASA.¹² The company now bills itself as one of the top 20 largest health club operators in the country, and it's grown fast through the Midwest lately, adding four Wisconsin clubs in the space of a couple years.² Whether that pace holds up is a separate question. Private equity-backed gym chains have a mixed track record nationally, though VASA has so far avoided the bankruptcies that hit some competitors during and after the pandemic.

Features of the Fitness Center

The club runs 4 a.m. to midnight on weekdays, 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturdays, and 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sundays.³ KidCare, VASA's supervised childcare add-on, keeps shorter hours and is closed entirely on Sundays.³ VASA Fitness offers the standard cardio, free weights, strength training machines, and bench presses; but also features a hot tub, cold plunge, sauna, steam room, basketball court, and InBody scans.