SpareMe Bowl & Arcade is closing. The downtown Iowa City bowling alley will shut its door for the last time on Wednesday night, SpareMe announced Friday on social media. It will be open daily from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. until then.
Heather Soseman, SpareMe’s general manager, told Little Village she was told informally last Wednesday the two-story bowling alley in the Chauncey would be closing. She was officially informed on Thursday.
“I was utterly shocked, and beyond disappointed,” she said.
Soseman was hired by Hawkeye Hotels to work on SpareMe in 2019, two years before its doors opened to the public in August 2021. Hawkeye Hotels is a Coralville-based property development and management company with hotels in 23 states. It also owns Hotel Chauncey, a 51-room Hilton hotel that is located on the floors above the two-story bowling alley.
“I picked out the flooring, every single video and arcade game,” Soseman said. “I built the menus, I built the team.”
In April, GreenState Credit Union foreclosed on the Chauncey and five other properties owned by developer Marc Moen and business associates. The Chauncey and three of the other buildings were slated to be sold at a Nov. 18 sheriff’s auction, but failed to attract anyone willing to meet the minimum required bid of $24 million.
Soseman said she didn’t know if the uncertainty surrounding the Chauncey since April had any impact on the decision to close SpareMe, because it had a lease that any landlord would have to honor. SpareMe was entering the holiday season, its busiest time of the year, when the decision came down.
“I was under the impression that we weren’t going anywhere,” she said.
Over the years, SpareMe has been a welcoming space in downtown Iowa City. It has hosted innumerable parties, corporate functions, as well as families and friends just looking for fun.
“We did a lot of great work with the community,” Soseman said. “Big Brothers and Big Sisters, Arc. We have folks with special needs who come in once a week, and we were the main outing for the week for some of them.”
With its wide selection of pinball machines, SpareMe also became an important venue for Iowa’s pinball community.
“SpareMe has a fantastic lineup of pinball machines (kept in pristine condition by Ryan Jerred) that range in theme, era, manufacturer and style of gameplay,” Lucas Benson, Iowa’s resident pinball columnist, wrote in Little Village last year.
“Honestly, I can’t think of a better setup for a college student or remote worker than to head to the Chauncey, grab a caffeinated beverage at the second-floor coffee spot fix!, then go down to SpareMe to enjoy a delicious brunch and free pinball in between study breaks.”
Soseman agreed. “This pinball community in Iowa City is really great, and we had people travel from all over the state to come here,” she said.
For more serious players, SpareMe held regular tournaments. Staff were preparing to host an upcoming state pinball tournament, which will now have to find a new location. But SpareMe will play home to one last pinball tourney on Wednesday, its final day.
“We have a pop-up tournament; it’s a ‘stall ball’ tournament,” Soseman explained. Players will rotate at the machines, each one playing until the ball stalls, then the next player takes over.
Soseman said the things she is going to miss most about SpareMe are the 26 staff members who work with her — “my team is the coolest people” — and “how I gave of myself to an idea that I really, really believed in.”
“But what I think I’m going to look back mostly on is the amazing community that came in and supported us.”
