On a busy thoroughfare in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens sits a women-only gym with faded hot pink signage. It is the last surviving location of Lucille Roberts, a chain of women’s health clubs that once thrived in New York, leading a trend that fused fitness with feminism. Now that it has dwindled down to just one location, its most loyal members have ended up here.
Women in their 50s and 60s who have worked out for decades at Lucille Roberts now take classes including Zumba and Brazilian Butt and Gut in a fluorescent-lit studio. They have little interest in going anywhere else. Signs on the walls remind members not to leave their purses and handbags unattended when they’re using the machines. A magenta poster announces: “Strong Women Work Out Here.”
On a recent afternoon at this gym on Austin Street, members explained why they have stuck with Lucille Roberts long after it was a leader in its field, with more than 50 locations in the New York area.
Marguerite Toussaint pumped some iron after finishing her morning shift as a hotel pastry cook at the Park Hyatt in Manhattan. She has been a Lucille Roberts member since the mid-1990s, when she signed up at a location in Brooklyn, not long after she moved from Haiti to New York. She wakes up each workday before dawn and trains here on her way home.
“All of us hope this gym never closes,” Ms. Toussaint said. “It’s not like other gyms. It’s a community for women. We care about each other here. If you don’t see somebody, you call and find out. ‘Hey, why didn’t I see you today?’ I don’t see that at Planet Fitness.”
Patricia Holloman, a retired Queens Criminal Courthouse corrections officer, was careful of her long blue nails as she handled weights. “When I tell people I go to a Lucy Roberts, they’re always like, ‘That’s still around?’” she said. “But I’m proud to be a member. Women are just more pleasant to work out with.”
Roaming the gym to interview Lucille Roberts loyalists, I found myself in a bygone fitness era. The exercise studio’s décor included retro blue mirrored beams and dingy white ceiling tiles pocked with tiny holes. A group of three women in their 70s wearing fanny packs chatted as they pedaled on ellipticals. There were no eucalyptus-scented towels to be found. Some members mopped their brows with colorful kitchen rags brought from home.
Huffing on a treadmill was Alexandra Rodriguez, 44, who works at a bakery in Queens. “Some friends tell me the idea feels dated: ‘Why would you go to a women’s only gym?’” she said. “I tell them it’s empowering. Honestly, I’m surprised this is the last Lucille Roberts. You’d think a place like this would be more valuable to women now more than ever.”
A Forgotten Fitness Pioneer
Long before these women formed their sisterhood, Lucille Roberts was a booming business with annual revenues of $50 million. It had some 200,000 members and was once a formidable rival to Crunch, Planet Fitness and Bally Total Fitness. It distinguished itself with its all-female clientele and cutthroat pricing, charging half or less than some competitors.
The chain entered New York’s pop culture through its energetic television ads, which seemed to air endlessly. They featured women in leotards exercising to pulse-pounding dance music, their impressive hair held back by headbands or scrunchies, as an urgent voice intoned: “Get started with Lucille Roberts new fat-burning, muscle-building program! It’ll push you to the limit!” These deals were always about to end: “Just $8.95 per year! But hurry! Sale ends Tuesday!”
Everyone in New York in the 1990s heard the number to call — 1-800 USA Lucille — and saw the brand’s founder, Lucille Roberts, clad in a dark power suit as she enticed viewers to join her gym by saying in a no-nonsense New York accent: “The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll get results.”
Ms. Roberts, who died of lung cancer at 59 in 2003, was the brand’s public face, and her story was a tale of New York reinvention that began in the ashes of war-torn Europe.
An early fitness fanatic, she conceived the idea of a women-only club after a workout buddy complained about the leering eyes of men at gyms. Borrowing money from friends and family, Ms. Roberts set up shop with her husband, Bob Roberts. It was 1970, the year before Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine, and the Roberts’ first gym was right across the street from Macy’s in Midtown Manhattan.
Soon, the exercise bikes and vibrating belt machines were drawing a clientele of secretaries, nurses, switchboard operators, flight attendants and volunteers from Ms. Steinem’s Women’s Action Alliance. The gym offered classes in self-defense, debt management and on how to report an abusive husband to the authorities.
As the gym grew into a chain, it helped set off the fitness craze that would revolutionize women’s health — a time of Jazzercise and leg warmers, of Jane Fonda VHS tapes and “Buns of Steel.” Rival gyms for women sprang up, including Elaine Powers Figure Salons and Living Well Lady. But Elaine Powers was created by a man — the so-called Elaine Powers didn’t exist — and Ms. Roberts eventually acquired a number of Living Well Lady locations, solidifying her dominance.
In her 1980 book, “The Lucille Roberts 14 Day Makeover Plan,” she described her vision: “Neither my health clubs nor my book are for people who can go to Swiss clinics or spend half of every day in a beauty salon. My life hasn’t been like that, and neither are the lives of my clients.”
“My clubs have free babysitting facilities because I know that most people don’t have an English Nanny at home to watch the toddlers while they attend class,” she added. “My system can help you lift your face and figure out of the ordinary into the striking, the beautiful, the classy.”
Ms. Roberts liked to say her mission was to become the “McDonald’s of health clubs” and often described her typical customer as “the cop’s wife.” The Lucille Roberts slogan was: “More Gym Less Money.”
“It’s only the upper classes who are into exercise for health, the middle classes just want to look good,” Ms. Roberts told The New York Times in 1997. “They just want to fit into tight jeans.”
After she died, her husband and sons ran the business until they sold it to the parent company of New York Sports Club in 2017. There were about 16 Lucille Roberts gyms at the time. One by one, they closed, leaving only the Forest Hills location, where memberships start at $34.99 a month.
Its days as a fitness time capsule may now be coming to an end. The current ownership will drop “Roberts” from the brand name, making it “Lucille by NYSC.” And the last location will undergo a renovation that will introduce new equipment geared more to strength training than cardio. Hot pink will remain part of the branding, as will slogans plastered around the gym like “Yes She Can,” but the faded sign out front will finally be replaced.
“Decades after the first Lucille Roberts opened, she’s receiving a glow-up to better meet member needs in an environment designed just for women and their workouts,” Kari Saitowitz, a spokeswoman for New York Sports Club, said. “The layout and equipment will be updated to reflect how women work out in 2025.”
Ms. Saitowitz added that the gym is still bustling these days, and its lights are kept on partly through the memberships of the Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women who prefer working out there. “It serves a diverse, passionate community,” she said, “including many women whose religious or cultural values prioritize modesty and who prefer a women-only fitness space close to home.”
The story of Lucille Roberts herself is little known to the women at the final location, but a few employees remember her well. One is Mary Anne Rodriguez, the gym’s manager, who started out as a receptionist for a location in Bayside in her 20s, before working as a trainer at gyms in Flushing and Astoria.
“She made us all want to deliver her vision,” Ms. Rodriguez said in the break room. “And you noticed her when she walked into a room. She was so stylish, beautiful and put together.”
“I remember the day a manager came to tell us she had died,” she added. “We were devastated. She was so ahead of her time, and she’s been underappreciated as a fitness pioneer.”
Laja to Lucille
Bob Roberts, a real estate investor who helped run the chain for more than 30 years, is now in his 80s and divides his time between Palm Beach, Fla., and the Hamptons. When reached by phone, he was surprised to learn there was only one Lucille Roberts left.
“I thought there were still a few around,” Mr. Roberts said. “Covid must have wiped them out. I’m not surprised it’s the Forest Hills location. That was always one of our best and most popular gyms.
“We sold because the way women worked out changed, so our business model stopped working,” he continued. “After Lucille died, a new women’s movement was beginning, and women didn’t mind working out with men anymore. Coed gyms were becoming social spaces. Women were getting into lifting weights. Planet Fitness was becoming big. We had too much competition.”
But Mr. Roberts seemed happy to hear from a reporter, and he used the interview to better commit his late wife’s life story to the record.
She was born Laja Spindel in 1943, the daughter of a traditional Polish-Jewish family, and she grew up for a time in the tundra of Siberia, to which her parents fled after the German occupation of Poland during World War II.
Her father, a tailor, was anguished by the loss of a son in the war, so he doted on Laja. From the far reaches of the Soviet Union, the family made its way to a displaced persons camp in Germany. When they came to the United States in the early 1950s, an official decided Laja needed a new name.
“Her name changed to Lucille at Ellis Island because Lucille Ball was popular,” Mr. Roberts said, referring to the star of the sitcom “I Love Lucy.” “They changed it from that beautiful name, Laja. She never talked about those years she spent at the camp, and I never pushed her to talk about it.”
The Spindels settled in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Lucille soon got the hang of English and began mapping out her future.
“Like all survivors who came to America,” Mr. Roberts said, “she believed the streets of New York were paved with gold. She decided early on she was determined to work hard to get ahead.”
After graduating in 1964 from the University of Pennsylvania, she worked for a time as a buyer for a Mays department store. She later quit a job at a Kitty Kelly shoe shop when she didn’t receive the raise she had been promised. She met Mr. Roberts while dancing at a friend’s apartment party. At the time he went by his original surname, Robert Orefice. He was an Italian-American Catholic from Queens, and Lucille’s mother groused at first about his not being Jewish.
At their first gym, he worked the front desk while she led exercise classes. She taught aerobics on the same day she gave birth to her first child.
As they plotted an expansion, they decided the brand should carry her name — but they worried that Orefice wasn’t catchy. So they joined their first names to come up with Lucille Roberts. A few years later, they legally changed their surnames.
“She was a no-nonsense person,” Mr. Roberts said. “She took no bull. Men can beat around the bush when it comes to business, but not her. Lucille was a very direct businesswoman. I think it all went back to how she grew up. Because when you come from hardship like that, you don’t take nonsense.”
Thirty years after starting the business, Ms. Roberts was leading an existence quite different from the lives of her largely working class customers. The family’s main residence was a townhouse on the Upper East Side and then a historic mansion nearby. She was chauffeured around town in a black limousine and she spent summers at the family estate in Southampton. Yet she remained intensely involved with the chain, managing the front desk at newly opened clubs, filling in to teach classes when instructors called in sick and moving the corporate offices to the family home.
She didn’t smoke, which exacerbated her family’s anguish when she was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“The doctors had plenty of theories,” Mr. Roberts said. “When she was a baby in Siberia, she had a rheumatic fever that left a small scar on her lung.
“They operated on her and took out what they could, but it came back,” he continued. “I knew, and she knew, she wasn’t going to survive this. But she tried for three years, and every day we woke up and pretended like nothing was wrong.”
The Mansion
The majestic limestone mansion on East 80th Street where Ms. Roberts spent the final years of her life was the ultimate manifestation of her success.
Just a block from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was built in the 1910s for an heiress to the retail titan Frank Woolworth. It has seven floors with nine bedrooms, about a dozen bathrooms, a library, a billiards room and a solarium.
The Roberts family still owns it. For the last year, Mr. Roberts and his sons — who together run the family real estate business, Roberts Equities — have been trying to find a buyer. They recently dropped the asking price to $49.9 million from $59.9 million.
Hoping to see the former seat of the Lucille Roberts empire, I asked the elder son, Kevin Roberts, if he would give me a tour. He met me at the Gothic entrance one recent afternoon and brought me into the mosaic-floored foyer. As he led me past glowing chandeliers and stone fireplaces, he seemed preoccupied.
“It’s sad,” he said. “She didn’t get to enjoy this. She was already sick when we moved here.
“But she always knew she’d end up like this. I once asked her why she never learned how to drive, and she told me, ‘Well, I always knew I’d have a chauffeur.’”
In a large empty room, he described what the bustling corporate offices had looked like. He remembered how his mother used to power jog in Central Park each morning — often with her friend, the cosmetics entrepreneur Adrien Arpel — before starting her workdays here. He recalled her soft spot for hiring young Polish women.
A memory hit him as he passed the kitchen.
“I saw her once gnawing on chicken bones, this woman who had come from out of the Holocaust,” he said. “I remember saying, ‘Mom, what are you doing?’ Then she put it down, like she was reminding herself she didn’t need to do that anymore.”
In the billiards room, Mr. Roberts grinned when he recalled how his mother didn’t get along with other moms in the neighborhood.
“She was the antithesis of them,” he said. “She liked women who had something going on in their lives. Those were the kinds of women she became friends with. They saw her as new money, and they didn’t like a woman who was working.”
I asked how she might have felt knowing there was just one Lucille Roberts gym left.
“She’d be regretful, but she was also sensible, and she’d have understood that what women wanted would change,” he said. “If she’d been able to continue, I think she’d have found a way for the company to adapt.”
“She would love knowing about these women still going there,” he added. “I’ll bet she probably even knew some of them. When my mother walked into her gyms, she was like a star to everyone. Because she was like them, but she’d made it — and she let them see they could make it, too.”
Alan Delaqueriere contributed research.
Alex Vadukul is a features writer for the Styles section of The Times, specializing in stories about New York City.
Leslye Davis is a documentarian and photographer. She reports across multiple desks and frequently collaborates with the newspaper’s designers and graphics department.
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