Last Call at Zoxx Social Club

One sunny day this past July, Andy Wilson, a Wisconsin tavern keeper, mounted an outdoor stage beside his bar in a backwards cap to perform Sublime’s 1996 hit single “What I Got,” an ode to not having much. Behind him, stretching to the horizon, was a vacant lot of cracked concrete and weeds. “Lovin’ is what I got,” he sang. “Lovin’ is what I got.”

But Wilson was in mourning: his bar, Zoxx Social Club, was soon to disappear. Once a popular watering hole for the city of Janesville’s massive General Motors assembly plant, the factory’s closure could have sounded the death knell for the establishment. Instead, Wilson and his wife, Desiree, revived Zoxx into a punky oasis: a place of amplified, late-night freedom for mall goths, outlaw bikers, home gardeners, and acid philosophers, for anyone but the buttoned-up Main Street elite. But the city of Janesville had other plans. Sensing a redevelopment opportunity, it opened eminent domain proceedings against surrounding property owners late last year, dooming Zoxx. Another blow came this summer. When the city failed to receive a federal grant to turn the site into housing and parks, it decided to explore something different: putting a data center there.

“It kills me,” Wilson said of that prospect. Industry is nothing new to Zoxx, which was created by union factory workers and outlived GM thanks to the same community spirit they fostered, just in a new generation. But data centers are not like the manufacturing hubs that once hummed in this part of the country: as the backbone of the booming AI industry, they profoundly threaten human labor and relationships. Silent, eerily clean, and largely devoid of life, they are the antithesis to the community that Zoxx, against the odds, tried to keep alive.

Janesville, a city of sixty-five thousand souls clustered around a bend in the Rock River, is best known to outsiders as the home of Republican politician Paul Ryan and as a convenient, if unremarkable, stop between Chicago and Madison. For almost a century, General Motors was Janesville’s industrial heart, located across the river on the city’s south side. Cadillacs, Buicks, and Chevrolets rolled off its assembly line and across the United States. At its peak in the 1970s, more than seven thousand workers from southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois drew their wages there.

Zoxx was founded by Roy and Jeri Zachow in 1961. Roy worked at GM and wanted a place to eat lunch with his buddies. At first, his coworkers were skeptical of the tavern gamble. But it paid off. The menu was a hungry autoworker’s dream: half-pound burgers, chicken wing specials, and beer. Line workers packed the bar during lunch breaks, spilling into the driveway. “A little bit of heaven on the gates of hell,” they called Zoxx. The bar made a killing. As GM bought out nearby property owners to expand the plant’s footprint, the Zachows rejected their offers. Zoxx ended up on an unusual parcel inside the GM parking lot.

The Zachows’ step grandson, Andy Sigwell, started working at Zoxx in 1990 after returning home from the military. He cleaned the place, helped in the kitchen, and later bartended. In 2005, he bought Zoxx. “That bar was teamwork,” he remembers. “All these guys knew they were able to have a few beers, go back, and perform better than before.”

Working on an assembly line is repetitive—screwing the same part onto each car trickling into view, over and over again. Some of that made its way into Zoxx. One worker marched in proclaiming the same line every day: “I’m here for a good time, not a long time.” Others always ordered the same Budweiser, Miller, or shot of Jim Beam, day in and day out. But with uniformity came brotherhood. The workers were unionized through United Auto Workers Local 95, and managers couldn’t show face at Zoxx. On the few occasions they did, usually to reprimand someone, they were quickly shown the door. Back inside the plant, of course, managers had the power to suspend the worker—but that’d land him right back at the bar, earning a free drink and a spot on the wall of pink slips. Zoxx was a place you felt liked for who you were. “That little twenty minutes was really important to a lot of those people,” Sigwell said. “Just to get out of that building.”

Sigwell held steady until the Great Recession came and the Janesville factory was passed over by the $49.5 billion bailout the federal government gave GM. The plant ceased production in 2009 and permanently closed in 2015. Around twelve hundred union workers were laid off. Some retired, some found new jobs, and some took GM relocation offers to other plants still in operation. Though a few regulars kept coming, the bar had relied on GM traffic—for decades, Zoxx didn’t even open on weekends—and its customer base dwindled.

But Sigwell vowed to keep going. He was soon helped by Andy Wilson—newly twenty-one, Wilson wandered into Zoxx on a lark. It was a chance encounter that was meant to be. Wilson started bartending and playing with his Sublime cover band Lou Dog. He brought his pot-smoking friends. The bar was a gem to them, laid-back and out of sight. While the plant that once fed thousands of families lay dark and crumbling behind it, Zoxx came alive. “He filled the bar,” Sigwell said. “He brought a new generation in.”

Then, in 2020, Andy and Desiree Wilson bought Zoxx from Sigwell and started making it their own. While old GM workers still came to reminisce, they’d now walk into open mics and craft fairs featuring everything from apple pie egg rolls to decorative saws. Or they’d find a Janesville Deaf Society party, filling Zoxx with flashing hands, whoops, and cackles. The Great Recession still threw its shadow over Janesville’s south side, which lost its only grocery store and saw little development compared to the city’s wealthier northern half. But while the outside world decided who deserved wealth and poverty, inside Zoxx, everyone got a slice of the pie. Regulars threw diaper drives and medical fundraisers. They turned Green Bay Packers games into potluck dinners of chili and corn muffins, with free shots for every touchdown. They always left a tip. At Zoxx, that spirit proved stronger than GM’s departure, and helped the bar thrive even when surrounded by a 240-acre symbol of economic loss.

Then came eminent domain. The Wilsons got a good price from the city. Still, Andy delayed signing the papers for months. In the end, he knew his family couldn’t afford taking Janesville to court. Charging rock-bottom prices and treating employees like the friends they were, the Wilsons never made much of a profit from Zoxx. They already had day jobs. They bought Zoxx because they loved it. It was where Andy spent untold nights entertaining with his band, goofing off with a costume box kept in the corner and getting to know Desiree, the woman he’d eventually marry, where she nursed the couple’s first child and found out she was pregnant with their second. Zoxx was a place for retired autoworkers and young punks, a place for dropouts and degree-holders, prison guards, pilots, and warehouse workers, for gay and straight, white and black, and everyone in between. “The city’s gonna knock the building down like it doesn’t mean anything,” Desiree said. “It obviously means something.”

Still, one unanswered question bothered the Wilsons: Why exactly was their bar, their little revival in the wasteland, part of the city’s condemnation order? Weren’t the remaining 240 acres enough? “I’d be happy to do whatever they wanted so that we could be part of the redevelopment,” Andy said. “And that was not an option.” (Janesville city officials did not respond to a request for comment.)

To city leaders in Janesville, putting a data center on the GM site represents something of an economic rebound. “The redevelopment of the GM/JATCO site as a modern data center campus is a forward-looking opportunity that balances our industrial past with our technological future,” wrote a city official in a July memo asking the city council to put out a call for interested developers. It did so, with just one council member voting against the motion. While their original redevelopment plan called for housing, a community building, and parks, officials had been getting calls from interested data center developers for months. They didn’t publicly announce a data center may be coming until eminent domain proceedings, at least for Zoxx, were almost over. Wilson called the timing a “kick in the teeth.”

But, for many, the AI boom is a gold rush too enticing to pass up. Wealthy investors shovel money at AI’s creators, who’ve persuaded them their product will change the world. Data centers power it all, swallowing land and electricity while employing few: after construction is over, most facilities require only between one and two hundred workers. Some $40 billion will be spent nationwide on data center construction this year alone, almost double the rate two years ago. Hot spots are in Arizona and northern Virginia, but Wisconsin has seen its own investment surge, thanks in part to a sizable state tax incentive. Meanwhile, McKinsey & Company estimates that spending on AI data centers would need to reach $5.2 trillion by the end of the decade—about one-sixth of the United States’ GDP—to keep up with demand.

Even the president of the United States wants to be part of it. In the Oval Office one day after his inauguration, Trump neatly summed up the consensus among America’s rich and powerful: “We have to get this stuff built,” he said, flanked by tech giants Sam Altman of OpenAI, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank. Though their project, a $500 billion investment dubbed Stargate, is off to a sluggish start, work has begun on a massive facility in Texas projected to use more energy than 4.4 million homes.

By seeking to cash in on data centers—albeit a smaller one than the behemoths going up in places like Phoenix—Janesville ignores an important investment that already contributed to the redevelopment of the GM site. When GM idled the assembly line, relocated its workers, and shut down the plant, it disinvested from Janesville. In the sixteen years since, Zoxx Social Club has done the opposite, fueled by the basic human desire for community and an affordable drink. It wasn’t always smooth—for a period, the bar became a magnet for police calls—but by demolishing Zoxx, Janesville will erase the last spot of life on the GM site, one created not by the prospect of financial gain but by the initiative of its own citizens.

Meanwhile, a data center represents a worse deal for locals than a factory like GM’s. To be sure, it would bolster the local construction industry and Janesville’s tax-funded municipal services. Politicians may tout this so-called investment in the city. But all investments are not created equal. If a data center is built, a piece of land that once fed thousands of union families will feed far fewer, even though it will still use a factory’s worth of electricity: city documents say that data center developers see leftover GM power lines as an asset of the site. If the data center is for AI, it will displace Zoxx’s strong, decades-old community in order to enable an industry whose core purpose for its largest users is to obsolesce human labor.

Currently, most companies report scant efficiency gains from adopting AI, raising questions about a potential investment bubble. But for now, the wave only grows, carrying with it the possibility of a future stadium-sized powerhouses of artificial intelligence will need more resources and land but will no longer require the one thing even industrial behemoths like GM couldn’t do without—us.

Two weeks before its scheduled closure, Zoxx Social Club threw one last party. Fittingly, they called it “End of Days.”

In a small dirt lot behind Zoxx, PBR perspired in sunburnt hands as musicians performed, many of them regulars at the bar’s open mic nights. Lining the chain-link fence, there was a dunk tank and inflatable skeeball. Families brought their children, who danced and played tambourines with a man dressed as a hot dog. Shade was scarce.

The Janesville Deaf Society watched it all from a cluster of folding chairs. “Our hearts were joined with this place,” signed one member, Jeff Holub. A lanky red-haired man in a Green Bay Packers polo shirt, Holub worked at GM for twenty-seven years. “I’ve got a lot of brothers that worked together here with us,” he continued. “And we built the best trucks in America.” Being at Zoxx again after their GM days “fills us up,” he signed. For him, the connection between the deaf and hearing at Zoxx “doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

Revelers milled through a cluster of market stalls. Besides a deaf-run Moroccan food truck, there were End of Days T-shirts for sale, a barbecue smoker loaded with ribs, as well as craft coffee and homemade salsa. There was also artist Brandi Dabson, a childhood friend of Andy’s. Much like Zoxx itself, she makes forsaken things beautiful. In her work, bottle caps and dry leaves become jewelry and candles; the skeletons of deer become mobiles. She compared Zoxx to “grandma’s house,” a place of reunions and years-old relationships. At this grandma’s house, though, shots flew across the bar while 50 Cent and Britney Spears shook the building’s old beams. “When your grandparents pass and you lose that house, then where does your family have holidays?” Dabson said. “Where the hell are we all gonna end up?”

As End of Days stretched into the night, Wilson got on stage again. Fireworks were promised at 10 p.m. and they soon began. The musicians paused their playing. The crowd hushed. Then, suddenly, Wilson drifted back to the mic. “Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,” he sang a cappella. “For purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain.” Fireworks shot red and green across the sky and scarred it with sparkling white. Soon, Wilson’s band started up again and the spell was broken.

From across the darkness of the GM lot, a soft wind blew. Someday soon, the data center may come. Humming, calculating, concocting deepfakes, writing college essays, chatting with the lonely and pulling us away from each other minute by minute, it is perhaps the best the architects of the modern economy can—or will—do for a growing number of American communities. It seems that way in Janesville, where Zoxx Social Club will be paved over, sealing in stone a simple promise: there will be no more life on the old General Motors site.