Best of Brooklyn: Gyms

Pre-Bean, I was more of a gym monkey than a gym rat. With the Bean, I like to make sure I get some exercise everyday, but I certainly don't spend nearly as much time at the gym as I used to. I've lived in Brooklyn for almost six years and belonged to 3 gyms, not including the oodles of dough I've hemorraged at various yoga and pilates places around town.

My first Brooklyn Gym was the YWCA on 3rd Ave and Atlantic Ave. Talk about cheap--I paid $300 for the whole year! Of course, you get what you pay for. There were like three treadmills, two StairMasters, and three stationary bikes. At least two pieces of equipment were broken at all times. My favorite was the bike whose seat was swathed in duct tape for 8 months! The ambiance of the place was really unique--it was mostly really old, black men who would lift crazy amounts of weights and ride each other between sets. There were two guys who literally wore the same outfit every single time I saw them and no, they didn't wash them.

When the ladies locker room wasn't full of camp groups, it was full older women with no qualms about showing off their birthday suits. I saw more nudity there than the summer I spent at a nudist colony. For a while there was a functioning sauna and steam room, which was closed down for violating like 75 health and safety codes. People would shave their legs in there! And stink it up with eucalyptus oil. Were there any amenities? Like towels or TV's? No,no towels, but they did install TV frames but never got the money for the actual TV's. There was a good pool, which wasn't very crowded and they had one terrific yoga teacher who I followed to various private studios. In hindsight, although the Y seems pretty skanky I liked it and was bummed when it closed.

After the demise of the Y, I joined to the Park Slope Fitness Club, which was certainly a step-up from the Y. I think it started at around $65.00 a month. There was a lot more cardio equipment and they gave you clean towels when you checked in and they had some decent yoga classes. No pool or cranky old men so all in all adequate but not that memorable.

Then Satan came to Park Slope and the PSFC got bought out by Crunch, which is an evil evil evil corporation. It's a total business so they pushed people join, which made it so crowded. The worst was the locker room, which I now see as misogynistic. There were an insufficient number of small lockers and thin little benches for dozens of women coming from work. As you know, NYC women have to carry a lot of stuff so if you made the mistake of going to the gym on a Tuesday at 6:00 PM, there'd be no available locker and no hanger for your coat so you'd have to stand around this tiny space with all your crap looking like a hawk waiting for someone to free a locker. They would fix the broken machines a lot faster than the Y did, but there were times when you would have to wait 30 mins for a treadmill. What really annoyed me was all the cutesy ads. Like: We know you only use us for your body. We're okay with that. Whatever, you think the first time you read it, but it's right in the stall so you end reading it 10,00 times. Crunch also raised their rates and sent some cutesy yet ambiguous letter saying so. All in all a terrible place.

Carrying the Bean in my belly, made me really miss swimming, which is one of the best things you can do while pregnant. So, I froze my Crunch membership for "medical reasons" and joined Eastern Athletic Club, which is right across from the library. My dream come true, no?

EAC is a little pricey at $104 month but since Crunch was $84 when I left, I thought the $20 increase would justify using the pool during my pregnant state. EAC is so nice. The pool is lovely--they even have a nice big plant. It's never been horribly crowded (mostly it's pretty empty) and the locker room is huge--no more hawk like behavior from this lady. Have I mentioned the views? You can see Manhattan from many of the windows. It feels so much classier than Crunch and, although you might not get this from my posts, I'm pretty classy when I'm not smoking my menthols and spitting my chewing tobacco. I joined EAC prior to N. getting the NH job, with the idea that once the Bean was born I could go back to Crunch. But now that I've see how the other half pumps the iron, there's no way I could go back to Crunch. N. said he suspected this would happen. Many moons ago he was a member of the EAC and really enjoyed his 2.5 workouts there. But he's more of a mental workout kind of guy.