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.
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.
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.
A Family Business
The Scotto Funeral Home had been a fixture in Brooklyn since it was founded in 1926, when at-home funerals were still common.
In 1947, the business opened at its longstanding address in Carroll Gardens, in the middle of a residential block, almost 15 years before modern zoning laws. The Scotto family, originally from Italy, lived in an apartment above the funeral home.
Mr. Scotto’s father, Salvatore, also known as Buddy, was the longtime funeral director and active in community politics. He pushed for the cleanup of the Gowanus Canal and “was very instrumental” in choosing the name Carroll Gardens for the neighborhood that had long been called South Brooklyn, according to Ron Schweiger, Brooklyn’s official historian.
The elder Mr. Scotto died in 2020 at the age of 91 and, two years later, the street where his funeral home stood was renamed in his honor. Part of his legacy was standing up to the mafia, even after receiving threats, former Mayor Bill de Blasio said in an interview.
“Buddy was the real thing,” Mr. de Blasio said. “He spoke out and said, ‘This is not who we are.’”
At its peak in the late 1980s, the business did about 250 funerals a year and had expanded into a third brownstone to meet the demand, Mark Scotto said. But change was afoot.
Since 2000, the community district that includes Carroll Gardens has become less racially diverse and a lot richer, according to Social Explorer, a data research company that analyzes the census. The median household income in 2022 was over $158,000, a 76 percent jump since 2000, and more than double the typical income citywide.
And many of the families that had patronized the business over the years have left, said Mr. Scotto, who ran the funeral home from 1990 to 2002. “This was failing as a business model,” he said.
Against his father’s wishes, Mr. Scotto left the funeral home to pursue a career in real estate, leaving the operation of the business to relatives. In 2018, facing mounting property taxes and shrinking revenue, Mr. Scotto said he was forced to close the funeral home (the business still operates at different locations in Brooklyn and on Staten Island).
The Local Guys
In 2020, as Mr. Scotto was beginning to remodel, Nick Vargas, 40, a civil engineer turned personal trainer, was looking to start a gym.
A few years passed and Mr. Vargas, who attended Public School 58 across the street from the funeral home, heard the building was still seeking tenants following delays in construction. He and his friend, Angelo Sasso, 38, a marketing director who grew up nearby, were intrigued.
“We wanted to do something different and quirky,” said Mr. Sasso, who inquired about the space last year.
Mr. Scotto, who planned to rent to a medical office tenant, was unconvinced.
“He hung up on me in three seconds,” Mr. Sasso said.
But the pair were persistent, stopping by the building often to chat about their shared history. Mr. Vargas was an altar boy at a local Catholic church and played basketball with Mr. Scotto when they were younger. Mr. Sasso’s family were the owners of Rainbow Market, a neighborhood grocery that has since become a board game store; he still lives above the shop.
“I found out they were neighborhood kids, then all the emotion started coming in,” Mr. Scotto said.
The deciding vote was Mr. Scotto’s wife, Jazmin Rojas Scotto, a chef and former model who hosted a television show about fitness in her native Paraguay. She was already planning to operate a small fitness studio in the property, when she heard about the business partners’ proposal.
“Now we’re all buddies,” Mr. Sasso said — and neighbors. Mr. and Ms. Scotto live with their children above the former casket showroom. And Ms. Scotto is joining the business as a personal trainer.
Real Estate Shuffle
After four years of hybrid work schedules and an uncertain office market, commercial real estate in New York City is still in flux, but bright spots are emerging.
Since 2020, 672 storefront gyms have closed in the city, but 585 have opened, the largest share of which are in Brooklyn, according to Live XYZ, a mapping company.
“Boutique fitness has certainly exploded,” said Greg Batista, a real estate broker with Ripco, unlike some of the low-cost, big gyms that have struggled since the pandemic. He cited the recent bankruptcy filing for Blink Fitness, the national gym chain that is expected to close several stores.
The trend bodes well for District, where memberships range from about $200 to $500 a month. Mr. Sasso said 1,500 people, nearly all of them local, have joined a waiting list for access to the space, which can accommodate only a few hundred members.
But the decision to open in a former funeral home was also financial. The lease is about 40 percent less expensive than the asking rent at some of the properties on nearby commercial streets, where the starting rent was at least $30,000 a month, Mr. Sasso said.
“If you walk down the block, you would never think there was a gym there,” said Msgr. Guy Massie, the pastor at nearby Sacred Hearts & St. Stephen.
At the partners’ request, the monsignor performed the Catholic blessing for the new gym. Mr. Vargas said they felt obligated to perform the ritual, out of respect for the souls who’ve passed through it.
But it was also a symbolic gesture, Mr. Sasso said.
“This place was about death,” he said. “Now it’s about life.”
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