By Ashley Taylor

At 10 a.m. on Saturday, J.P. Sacco placed the first wet clay brick on the dome of a new wood-fired pizza oven at his former business, Sacco's Bowl Haven. Five hours later, Evan Fetras, the future manager of the Day Street hangout, laid the final bricks on the second oven. The business is literally changing hands.

The bowling alley's new owners, Flatbread Company, invited the whole community to help build two brick ovens for the new pizza restaurant and bar that will open in June. Flatbread Company is keeping ten of Sacco's fifteen lanes open for bowling. They removed lanes one through five to make way for the pizza ovens and will replace Sacco's pool tables with restaurant tables.

This transfer of management takes the bowling alley out of the Sacco family, which has run the business since 1939, and brings novelty and change to a Davis Square institution whose motto is "The way it was is the way it is."

The Sacco's said they are ready to give up the business and happy that new managers will preserve the bowling alley. Flatbread fans are thrilled to have a new pizza place. Yet some who liked Sacco's the way it was are sorry to see the business change.

The last of Sacco's 19 bowling alleys is passing from brothers Joseph and Damon Sacco, the great-grandsons of the businesses founder, Ralph Sacco, to John Meehan and Jay Gould, originally of Amesbury, Massachusetts, who founded the Flatbread Company there in 1998. Flatbread has opened eight restaurants, and Sacco's will be number nine. Flatbread Company has not bought the Sacco's building, yet; they have a five-year lease with the Sacco brothers with the option to buy.

Saturday's oven-building party welcomed the Davis Square community inside the new Sacco's. At the beginning of the day, the ovens' stone foundations and the twig framework for the clay domes on top were already in place. Saturday was spent covering that framework with clay bricks.

People of all ages mixed wet clay, sand, ash, and hay in plastic trays into the material for bricks. When it reached the right consistency, they took a handful and formed a wet glob to place on the oven dome. Row after row of these bricks covered the entire dome. At the end, they smoothed together the individual bricks and left them to dry.

Flatbread provided guests with Flatbread t-shirts, cold drinks, , and pizza. Everyone seemed to be having fun.

Liz Cannistraro, of Newton, was ecstatic to be building a Flatbread oven. She goes to every Flatbread she can find and describes herself as a "Flatbread fan."

On Sunday night at 10 p.m., the jukebox was playing and balls were rolling down lanes six through 16 under a truncated sign "-WL HAVEN." It was the last hour of business before Sacco's closes for six weeks of renovations that started Monday. Flatbread Company is going to put in new pin setting machines, refinish the lanes, redo the leaky roof, and renovate the whole building.

The cost of renovating the building is one of the reasons the Sacco brothers decided to give up the business. J.P. Sacco said, "It would cost probably $500,000 for us to update appropriately, so there wouldn't be leaks while the bowlers were bowling and everything…We weren't generating enough money to do the renovations, so this was another way to get everything done and keep the business going."

Beyond that, the Sacco brothers were just tired of running the business. In 1996, they took the candlepin bowling business over from their father, who was ready to sell the business then. Over time, Sacco said, both brothers lost interest in running the business and were "a little burnt out."

But they wouldn't sell to just anyone. "If we were going to sell it or lease it, it was gonna stay a bowling alley," Sacco said.

They started thinking about selling the building four years ago, and it took that long to find someone who would preserve the bowling alley.

Co-owner John Meehan said that Flatbread company is "totally stoked about having a bowling alley. We don't normally open up in bowling alleys, but this place is already a community center, and we want to be a community center at some point in our existence, so I think it's a perfect match for us."

Flatbread co-owner Jay Gould said that Flatbread Company plans to keep many of Sacco's former employees. "We're keeping as many of them as we can, 'cause they know what they're doing. We don't know how to run a bowling alley."

One of those employees, Matthew Hegarty, was sorry to see the business change hands. He has worked at Sacco's for seven years. He hasn't spoken to the new owners, but he doesn't think he'll keep working at Sacco's when it reopens in June.

He said there "hasn't been much communication," between the new owners and the old employees.

He also regrets the loss of an a Davis Square icon. "It's just going the way of Davis Square, losing a lot of the older hangouts." He mentioned that some of the bowling leagues at Sacco's were forced to cut their seasons short or move to another bowling alley when Flatbread Company took at the first five bowling lanes.

A member of the Monday night bowling league, Dave Goff, said just that. "We're not very happy with it. We've been bowling there for 32 years, and now we have to switch to a new bowling alley."

Some bowlers at Sacco's last week still didn't know of the upcoming changes but expressed optimism. Matt Smith, of Davis Square, has bowled at Sacco's a couple of times a week for several years. "Obviously it'll change," Smith said. "But change isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think it'll probably inject some new life into it."