Hardcore lifters sometimes take a twisted pride in their ogre-like ugliness and the ugliness of their dank dungeon-like gyms. They scoff at mirrors and ferns. A gym is a place for chalk, iron, sweat, and blood.
I suppose they’re reacting to people like David Barton and his customers:
On a recent Thursday night, the 38,000-square-foot David Barton Gym on Astor Place was throbbing to the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” Up the white-plaster staircase, candles flickered in the virgin springwood-paneled yoga room. Down below, a line of porcelain doll heads grinned over the moodily lighted lobby as lithe young things churned past the reception desk, designer gym bags in tow.
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“We call this Victorian punk,” Mr. Barton, 46, said of the décor in his raspy, staccato, Mickey Rourke voice, his right biceps spasming, as it constantly does. “It’s like some punk rockers took over an old East Village church and made it cool.”Few things at a David Barton gym look uncool. Since Mr. Barton opened his first gym in Chelsea in 1991, he estimates that he has grossed $230 million with six fitness centers in New York, Miami Beach, Chicago and elsewhere that feel more like nightclubs (noirish lighting, live D.J.’s, spalike locker rooms) than workaday gyms.
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His first gym, in the unlovely basement of a 1970s apartment building on West 15th Street, was an instant hit among the neighborhood’s burgeoning gay populace. It featured a relentless house-music track, lush spotlighting and wall-to-wall mirrors that seemed to magnify a culture of muscle worship.“I’d never worked out before, and that gym pretty much changed my life,” said Amanda Lepore, the transsexual party hostess whose surgically enhanced body Mr. Barton has featured in ads. Mr. Barton would let Ms. Lepore and other downtown club figures work out free in exchange for the buzz. “David showed me that I could sculpt my body with weights,” Ms. Lepore said, “which is better than plastic surgery, because you can control it more.”
Other clubs followed on the Upper East Side and in other cities, including Miami Beach, where the opening of the David Barton gym in the Delano hotel in 1995 helped brand that hotel as one of South Beach’s hot spots and where, later, its move to the Gansevoort South was seen as something of a coup for that hotel. Toned down somewhat from the flamboyant Chelsea original, the subsequent locations still succeeded in defining an entirely new kind of gym experience, one that felt as much like hitting a glitzy party as logging an everyday workout.
“David Barton created the prototype of the gym-as-nightclub that has been widely imitated,” said Taylor Hamilton, a senior analyst covering sports and fitness for IBISWorld, a market research company. “They’re probably the highest cachet gyms in the U.S. other than Equinox.”
In 2004, Mr. Barton fulfilled a dream to move his Chelsea flagship to a higher-profile site: the former McBurney YMCA, a century-old landmark on West 23rd Street. It became his most nightclubby gym, with the weight room swathed in theatrical shadows, D.J.’s pumping dance music at night and a fiber-optic light show in the steam room.
Tales of hijinks in the men’s locker room became the stuff of gay urban legend.