There’s an expansive new climbing gym and workout facility on Broome Street, between Clinton and Suffolk streets, going all the way to Delancey Street. VITAL, a 50,000 square foot Rock Climbing & Fitness Gym (182 Broome St.) officially opened in the Essex Crossing Space in late November.
We got a personal tour from co-founder Nam Phan, while the finishing touches were still being added. Phan founded VITAL with his partner David Sacher in 2010. The pair met in college and started climbing together in San Luis Obispo.
They opened their first gym on the west coast shortly after college, and have been building VITAL gyms in different locations ever since.
A 20-year lease was signed last year with Delancey Street Associates, a joint venture of Taconic Partners, L+M Development Partners, BFC Partners, the Prusik Group, and the Urban Investment Group within Goldman Sachs Asset Management. During and after the pandemic, it became clear the plan for Essex Crossing Market Line was no longer viable, so the VITAL team was happy to jump in.
The impressive LES space is their eighth location, including one in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and three in San Diego, where the company is based. They are currently looking to open additional gyms in Manhattan, but large spaces are obviously hard to come by.
A lot of the architecture that had been designed for the Market Line was already a nice fit, with tall skylights in the spacious three story building. The live green walls leading to the upper cafe space had already been built, so they were able to continue around that design and customize it for climbers and athletes of all sorts.
Technically VITAL is considered a bouldering gym, which means no ropes, and the routes are lower to the ground, so falling is done safely, on the mats below the climber.
There are different routes to choose from on a variety of walls, at with different difficulty levels and they get changed up every day. There’s even a blue tooth app that shows different routes that light up and can be used globally.
The space also offers a weight lifting gym, a stretching area, cardio and fitness classes, a separate state of the art professional cycling studio, yoga classes and a sauna.
Georgie’s, a cafe and laptop space on the top level is open to the public from 9am to 8pm.
Climbing in general has been getting more popular in recent years and Phan agrees it has definitely gone “mainstream.” It’s an olympic event now, but back when two partners started climbing, climbing gyms were built in industrial business parks, way outside of a city core.
“You’d have to drive out there and it’d be next to the electrical supply house or there’d be a plumbing shop on the corner,” he said. “Nowadays you find them in beautiful facilities closer to where people work and live. It’s [finally] popular enough to support that and it’s grown quickly.”
VITAL bouldering gym is open 24/7 for members and membership is $155/month. Membership includes a wide range of activities along with climbing, including fitness, yoga (a gorgeous specially designed studio), aerial classes, youth programs, and multipurpose community and laptop work spaces.
