The WBAY Building at 115 South Jefferson Street in downtown Green Bay.
What is now known as the WBAY Building started in 1924 as a Knights of Columbus health center. From the bottom up, it featured an Olympic-size swimming pool, a restaurant, a gymnasium, and -- at the time -- the largest auditorium in the city. On the second floor you would find a billiard parlor and meeting rooms. The third floor featured a community kitchen, a lodge room which became a small gym, and four handball courts.
In the 1940s, the Norbertine Fathers -- the same order of priests that began St. Norbert College in De Pere -- took over the building. Back in 1925, Father James Wagner enjoyed experimenting with crystal radio sets at St. Norbert College. He applied for a permit and started a campus radio station, WHBY. It was said the call letters stood for "Where Happy Boys Yodel." When the Norbertines took over the WBAY Building, they began operating WHBY radio from the third floor. Even today we still receive mail addressed to WHBY -- even though the television station has never used those call letters.
When television came along in the 1950s, the Norbertine Fathers applied for a license. They were approved to build the first television station in Northeast Wisconsin, and only the second TV station in the state (the first being in Milwaukee).
WBAY-TV went on the air March 17, 1953. WBAY TV & Radio operated from the third floor. The television studio occupied the lodge room.
The school was moved out of the building and became Premontre High School (now Notre Dame Academy).
In 1954, an addition was built on the back of the building for new studios and production facilities. That expansion includes our news sets and StormCenter 2. For four decades, the studios included a fully-functional kitchen set.
In 1991, the Bay Bowl bowling alley and diner that operated in the lower level of the WBAY Building was replaced with a new, computerized newsroom, which more than tripled the size of the News Department's workspace. This doubled the number of editing rooms to allow the news, sports, and weather departments to share the same space and work more closely together (until the construction of the immense StormCenter 2).
And through the floorboards of one basement storage room, you can still see where the Olympic-size swimming pool once was.
