LA Fitness coming to 100 Barclay
LA Fitness, the gym founded in 1984 just east of Los Angeles, has taken the Rumble Boxing space — and a little more — on the West Street side of 100 Barclay, aka 142 West. (These are pics from when Rumble opened there in 2019.) I don’t think there are any other locations in Manhattan, but there are three in the Bronx and about a dozen on Long Island.
They are known for their reasonable prices, racquet courts (they were founded in the racquetball heyday), sports leagues and classes. The basic membership for the club in Santa Monica (I was trying to pick another urban area) is $35 a month with a $99 initiation fee.
The gym now has more than 600 locations across the country — at one time it was the largest chain of non-franchised fitness clubs in North America, according to a case study by Harvard Business School. Founded by Chinyol Yi, Louis Welch and Paul Norris, the privately held company now also runs City Sports Clubs and other fitness studios.
However, it continued to expand aggressively, focusing on a full-service model, often including swimming pools and racquetball courts, at moderate prices. Rumors of an IPO had circulated for over a decade, triggered by the fact that several private-equity houses had invested in the business and might be looking for an exit. In 2014, the company had arranged up to $1.6 billion in debt to fund expansion and buy out some investors. Whether this would be sufficient to appease its owners and support future growth was not clear. Nor was it clear how much more expansion LA Fitness could expect with its full-service model in the highly competitive fitness-club industry.
