Hidden In This Climbing Gym: A Thriving Co-Working Space

On the walls: Harnessed climbers leaping from hold to hold. On the floor: Weight-lifting and yoga-classing exercisers. And mixed through it all: Tables full of laptop-tapping entrepreneurs and freelancers.

This is the newest location of the Brooklyn Boulders climbing gym, which (despite its name) is actually in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens. This is also the newest iteration of an experiment: Can a fully functional co-working space exist in the midst of the sweat, chalk, chaos, and camaraderie of a large-scale climbing gym? A one-stop shop for your body, mind, and fledgling startup. There's even a soundproof room and access to a kitchen.

Brooklyn Boulders co-founder Lance Pinn describes how a member could spend pretty much their entire day at the gym:

"When we arrive, we grab some nitro cold brew from the retail shop, then head to any available hot desk to set up shop. Then, we blast through languishing emails and assignments for a quick half hour or more, until we notice that we've been too stagnant. That's when we take a break and go for a quick climb or three to get the blood pumping and warm up the rest of the body. Then it's back to work or a call. Step and repeat throughout the day, maybe taking a break at lunch time to play ping-pong, or horse around on the slack line or ninja warrior training equipment. Then, a little computer work before dinner and we can jump in a capoeira class or train for a bit, then relax in the sauna and take a shower before going out to get some ramen. For some reason, there always seems to be a ramen shop that pops up around each Brooklyn Boulders location within a year of our opening."

If you've ever dreamed of having a gym—not to mention a climbing wall, yoga studio, and sauna—within steps of your desk, the appeal of mixing work with working out is obvious. And with a large (and always growing) body of research linking physical exercise to mental firepower, it's not hard to see such a setup serving as a productivity boost for at least some people. 

According to Pinn, the evolution of Brooklyn Boulders into a co-working space was organic. The gym's original location, opened in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2009, has long had free Wi-Fi that visitors would frequently take advantage of by tackling work tasks between climbs and reps. "They were just hunched over on their laptops on the mats and we actually had to ask them to come to our offices in the back because we had no seating designed for co-working," Pinn says.

So when the company began opening new locations, it began to look for ways to better accommodate such laptop warriors. Its chief inspiration: Starbucks.

"We integrated a 'Starbucks Experience' into our retail area," Pinn says. "Once the space was made, we could observe how people were using it, and that's when we noticed that they were starting to camp out all day and take breaks every so often. We decided to customize the seating and add pull-up bars above standing desks to make the space as accommodating as possible for the lifestyle that we were co-creating with our members."

Since then, a number of members have turned Brooklyn Boulders into their daily office space, which is (somewhat surprisingly) a budget alternative to a traditional co-working space. Desk access at co-working giant WeWork starts at $220. Membership at the Queens Brooklyn Boulders costs $135 a month. And while traditional co-working spaces certainly offer a larger suite of work-centric amenities, it would be very unusual for one to have a climbing wall (or 10).

Brooklyn Boulders now has four locations: Brooklyn, Queens, Chicago, and Somerville, Massachusetts. All of them have Wi-Fi and at least some co-working friendly space, though only the newer locations were built with this feature in mind from the ground up.