game ape In a Transformed Neighborhood, a Funeral Home Finds New Life as a Gym

In gentrifying Brooklyn, as neighborhoods shift, once booming businesses can fade away.

But at District, a new gym inside the former Scotto Funeral Home in Carroll Gardens, there’s hope in the afterlife.

Carved out of the combined lower floors of two stately brownstones on a tree-lined block, the 3,500-square-foot gym replaced what for decades had been dimly lit chapels, a casket showroom and a smoking lounge for the bereaved.

ImageIn its heyday, the funeral home stretched across parts of three adjacent brownstones. The former chapels, casket showroom and smoking lounge are now filled with weights and workout equipment. Credit...Scotto Funeral Home

The business, scheduled to open on Friday the 13th, is one of the odder examples of a growing trend in the city’s changing streetscape: boutique gyms in neighborhoods where residents are spending more of their time and money, far away from the office towers of Midtown Manhattan. Commercial rents are still below prepandemic highs in several neighborhoods, while many stores are relying less on central office districts than they were before Covid, in part because many New Yorkers are commuting to work fewer days a week. For some business owners, the shift has opened a range of new leasing options in spaces they might not have thought possible a few years ago.

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Indeed, it was the market, not the macabre, that led to the gym’s unusual origin: a pact between a onetime funeral director, a Paraguayan model turned fitness coach and two local businessmen. Fate may have played a role.

“I buried people in their families,” Mark Scotto, the funeral home’s onetime director and the property owner, said about his new tenants, the two businessmen, who grew up minutes away from the chapel. “It was meant to be,” he said.

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