How New York City’s Most Beloved Climbing Gym Survived Its Eviction
For GP81, the city's only remaining independent climbing gym, surviving in expensive Brooklyn has meant leaning on its community.
The post How New York City’s Most Beloved Climbing Gym Survived Its Eviction appeared first on Climbing.
There’s something magical about spring in Brooklyn: children dancing through the spritz of unclasped fire hydrants, your favorite sing-a-long eavesdropped out of an open car window, the juicy jubilee of splaying out in the grass and drinking a beer. However, for GP81 owners Cliff Simanski and Julian Acevedo, spring 2023 was one long and dissociative nightmare.
It began with an eviction notice. The building that housed their 6,200 square feet gym for the last five and a half years was going to be demolished, their landlord said, to make way for new development.
On April 24, they broke the news on Instagram, announcing that they’d be closing their doors in June and that they would do everything in their power to find a new home for the gym. GP81’s loyal community lamented—but they also expressed their faith. “GP81 will live on!” read one Instagram comment. “Where y’all go we follow,” said another.
But with Brooklyn real estate more expensive than ever, and with their credit cards still shouldering heavy balances due to their business losses during COVID, Acevedo and Simanski weren’t sure whether GP81 had a future.
Average Joe’s Vs. the Globo-Gyms
For nearly seven years, GP81 has remained an independent business, even as New York City’s other local gyms have been absorbed by larger conglomerates. With “anti-mega” as their business email, GP81 has always touted a DIY approach to their business; the two owners built out their original location at 81 Quay Street in Greenpoint (hence the name) from scratch and with no previous carpentry or gym-management experience.
They outfitted the former garage simply, with two Moon Boards and flat 30, 45 and 60 degrees walls. To preserve the core climbing atmosphere that’s paramount to their ethos, they also decided not to allow birthday parties and potentially rambunctious climbers under 13—something that would be unfathomable to most profit-focused gyms. But there was a market for that core space. Simanski and Acevedo were delighted to find their gym quickly gaining a crop of devoted followers. Among them was Ashima Shiraishi, a youth World Champion and the first woman to climb a boulder graded V15, who told Outside Magazine in 2022: “It’s a close-knit community and the people are awesome.”
I can attest. If I had a word cloud of the conversations I had with dozens of members about their devotion to GP81, it would be a fluffy mishmash of community, people, friends, and family. The word cult (endearingly said) even came up more than once.
“I feel like every time I come here, there’s a sense of everyone happy together, like a family,” said Rio Nose, a GP81 member. “More so than just coming to climb.”
“There’s a strong sense of togetherness,” agreed Gary Silkes, who has climbed at the gym since its original opening day in 2018.
Sebastian Planfield, GP81’s head setter, believes the familiar faces also make for better climbing: “You feel more comfortable when you’re not climbing in front of a bunch of strangers. You feel like you belong.”
On any given day, it’s not an unusual sight to spot the setters, owners, and other employees among the crash pads. “It’s a gym for climbers by climbers,” said Vadim Vinokur, a former World Cup climber who lives and works in the City.
Simanski and Acevedo attribute their community’s sense of collective ownership to their hands-off, “it’s your gym, we’re just building it” approach. “We want the users of the gym to feel like it’s their own space, to feel comfortable and organize their own groups and their own meetups. They have an opinion that matters, and they have a presence that’s really recognized and appreciated,” added Simanski.
Many members also brought up the strong routesetting as another one of GP81’s primary powers. “It’s intimidating in all the right ways,” said Kay Kim, who has been climbing at GP81 for six years. “They are notorious for having a harder grading system. It pushed me to be a better climber.”
Even some of the world’s best think so: “The climbing quality is the best in the city. The wall angles are catered toward outdoor climbing, so there’s a higher density of steeper pitches,” said Shiraishi.
To use an analogy from the classic 2004 comedy, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story: If GP81 is Average Joe’s, then the other climbing facilities in New York City are Globo-Gyms. And when Acevedo and Simanski closed the gym’s doors in 2023, GP81’s strong (literally and figuratively) community dispersed to the Globo-Gyms gyms, all of which are part of one chain or another.
While the corporate structures and venture capital backings of these larger gyms do offer more in terms of modernized facilities, like saunas and yoga rooms, GP81 members felt the vibe shift immediately when they joined the various mega-gyms across town. They hoped these were temporary migrations.
As Evelyn Jeong, a member of six years, put it: “I wanted my gym back.”
Finding the needle in the haystack
With their members despondently displaced, Simanski and Acevedo immersed themselves in the search for a replacement space for their community.
During the hunt, they stored their broken-down inventory in their old Greenpoint location. However, the space was far from operational during this time. Electricity and plumbing was shut down. When it rained, water flooded up from the toilets. The landlord knocked a hole in the wall to do core samples and spewed gallons of water into the space, damaging supplies and leading to theft. Meanwhile, Acevedo and Simanski were still paying rent. Adding insult to injury, “to this day, we’ve never seen our security [deposit],” said Acevedo.
After striking out in a quickly gentrifying Greenpoint, they broadened their search to other neighborhoods, even other boroughs. But they still came up empty. Everything was either too expensive, too small, or too remote.
“The location was important to us, the proximity to the subways. But, honestly, after so many months of looking for a space, it just kind of came down to ‘you guys don’t have a choice,’” said Acevedo.
Finding a space to house their climbing gym felt like Goldilocks and her porridge. The walls had to be tall enough (at least 18ft); no columns could exist in the space; the location needed to be convenient enough for commuters, and the ventilation had to be sufficient.Finally, after more than 200 tours and a six-month lease negotiation, Simanski and Acevedo found a juuuuuust right space—with some caveats. 379 Jefferson St., located in a trendy part of Bushwick known for its nightlife and street art, was 300 square feet smaller than their Greenpoint predecessor, which meant sacrificing their old treadwall. It was also located near a different train line, which could be a dealbreaker for members used to the previous commute.
But before the owners could even worry about all that, they first had to transform the former metal fabricator warehouse into a climbing gym.
“Literally every day was a struggle,” said Acevedo.
When the duo signed the lease, they were promised a clean space. However, when they walked into it for the first time as renters, they were greeted with unassailable evidence of its industrial past. Heavy old machines still had to be removed before they could start any construction. The cement had sunk where a 25-ton machine had once stood, and when they cut the slab away, they found the dirt beneath the concrete saturated with oil. They replaced the slab with six fresh inches of concrete, but it wasn’t long before the oil began seeping back up through the floor.
“God only knows how many hours we spent jackhammering concrete and shoveling it into dumpsters and figuring out what kind of concrete mix we needed,” laughed Simanski.
Other tasks included: Constructing new climbing walls, building out cabinets, painting the ceilings, installing rolling gate doors, swapping out halogen bulbs, mounting speakers, and adding bathrooms.
Yet, even as they made progress with the space, there were times that the signed lease felt like a shackle. Simanski and Acevedo, who had barely recovered after their closure during COVID, had already maxed out their credit cards during the past tumultuous few years.
“We always kind of joked sadly, like, ‘What would it take for us to walk away?’ Like how much would someone have to give? We were like, ‘What about we pay you $10 to take it?’” quipped Acevedo.
But their community kept the two going. “We’d randomly get a message from someone that would be very heartfelt, something really sweet about GP that would get us through one more day,” reflected Simanski. “Most of the time it was from people that I wouldn’t have expected to hear a message from or I didn’t have a personal relationship with. So we were like, ‘Okay, we should keep going. We can do this.’ It really fueled the fire on the days when we couldn’t justify what we were doing anymore.”
Other folks helped in more practical ways. A former member, who owns his own climbing gym in Virginia called State Climb, drove through the night with his plasma cutter to help dismantle the steel beams at the old Greenpoint location. Another friend happened to be working on a construction site in their new neighborhood and assisted with laying the foundation. An anonymous member started a crowdfund to solicit donations on Venmo.
“To see so many people step up at such an important time,” said Simanski, “It was just like someone saw our distressed bat signal and, at this perfect moment, enough money came in to help us cover the rent that was about to be due.”
In GP81 We Trust
Roughly 81 weeks after the gym’s closure, on a sunny spring Saturday masquerading as summer, climbers congregated under industrial lights and plangent old-school hip-hop.
Some swung their arms to warm up and took turns on the wall. Others idled on the mats, chatting with friends they hadn’t seen in over a year. Everyone was there for the same purpose: To climb and to hang, the order of priority an afterthought.
Emblazoned on a steel beam overlooking the climbing walls were the words: In 
we trust. Below the arrow sat a plank with the gym’s logo.
For many, GP81’s reopening was the happy victory of a year-long waiting game. Members came flooding back, delighting in the preservation of the gym’s soul.
“My first time back with the gym open, it was like nothing had changed. It was kind of like The Twilight Zone or something,” said Kara Norton, a routesetter at the gym.
“Every time I’m in here, I get to see an old face. It makes me so happy,” added Hannah Wineinger, an employee of three years.
Despite the owners’ original concerns, the inconvenience of the new location seems to be little deterrent for most members of the community. It used to take Wineinger 15 minutes to get to work. Now, she lives more than an hour bike ride away: “It’s about 12 miles here and 12 miles back. It’s worth it, though, I think it doesn’t matter where I live. I’d still come over here.”
“Getting to the gym is a bit of a shlep,” admitted Vinokur. Even though he lives in South Brooklyn, just a 15-minute walk from two different mega-gyms in Gowanus, he still prefers taking a train into Manhattan and another back into northern Brooklyn to climb at GP81. “Because it’s good, you could absolutely overlook that inconvenience.”
As sunlight trickled out from the vast windows on that spring Saturday, the front desk employee announced that everybody had 30 minutes left before closing time. A chorus of loud boos echoed against the 23-foot ceiling, reverberating ripples of laughter through the gym. Climbers performed their last attempts on their projects and began congregating near the lockers for collective post-send plans. GP81 would close for the night, but the climbers left, together, and with the peaceful knowledge that they could return and try again tomorrow.
The post How New York City’s Most Beloved Climbing Gym Survived Its Eviction appeared first on Climbing.