CJC.org

Last month, I joined the HFC Athletic Club, about ten minutes walk from the apartment. Downtown Cleveland isn’t like New York City in terms of gyms. The latter is littered with branches of New York Sports Club, Crunch, Equinox and a sprinkling of mom-and-pop fitness centers, catering to particular urban neuroses about fitness and hipness. The former has a few small chains or independents, and has Geauga County nearby, which was unfortunately on the far side of the overweight-urban sprawl regression. HFC seems to belong to a small chain, and it doesn’t appear to be a massive gym with a long membership list, but it has good facilities: it’s built on top of a parking structure, so it has an outdoors area for tennis, basketball and running. It also has a pool and racquetball courts. The only thing it lacks is a dedicated stretching area, with permanent mats. For now, I make do with the little foam yoga mats that they have stacked in out-of-the-way corners near the stairs to stretch. The hours aren’t as full-time as I’m used to at New York Sports Club: it’s basically open during the week, and just 9-5PM on Saturday. It’s closed on Sunday.

(I think this is due to relatively few people living in Downtown Cleveland. Most of the members are in the area for work, and live in the suburbs. The analogy might be the NYSC down in Wall Street, which had fairly restricted hours during the weekend, as opposed to the ones on the Upper West Side. I’m also under the impression that a lot of people in the suburbs will also have the Bowflex or Nordic Track in the basement. Whether the machine is being actively used or is just a glorified clothes hanger, its presence may make the owner reluctant to shell out dollars to join a gym away from home. Interestingly, most of the people I saw at HFC during lunch time — including the apparently daily/weekly game of pick-up basketball — are older men, a very different demographic from the typical New York Sports Club. Possibly, this may be due to the area’s worker demographic and the existence of the Bowflex at home in the suburbs.)

Back in March and April, after the Match, when we researching where to live, I came up with a list of apartment buildings that had in-suite laundry, covered parking and its own gym/fitness center. This led to a number of nice and not-so-nice places, mostly in Downtown Cleveland, but the place we eventually wound up in, which was head and shoulders above every other place we saw in terms of space and not having wall-to-wall carpeting, wasn’t on the original list because it didn’t have a gym; we dropped in only because we saw the sign and we had about an hour to kill before the next appointment. While looking at the place, the management agent noted that most building gyms tend to be small and crappy, so why use the space for something like that when the building is within a short walk of five or six places? I couldn’t argue with that.

I found a list of local gyms through this helpful Cleveland.com forum posting, and we did visit about three of them: the HFC where I wound up, Cleveland Atheltic Club and The Club at Key Center. A number of people in the building actually belong to the Key Center one, and we had a referral to see one of the membership managers there at one point. The problem with CAC and Key Center is that they’re really not gyms; they’re more like urban country clubs that happen to have gyms attached to them (and CAC has a certain mustiness to it, typical of places that saw better days decades ago). Both have dining rooms that require proper business attire to eat in (and a bar area where you can get food, but with a relaxed dressed code of “business casual”), with the bill being signed to one’s monthly tab. Both also have various club functions, such as cooking classes, social committees and the like, but, really, I just wanted a gym, not a place to take clients or talk with people I just saw in the locker room (on the other hand, I socialize with people I try to throw through the mat; I’m not sure which is stranger). CAC did have more impressive gym facilities than Key Center, though, mainly because of the decent-sized pool (apparently one of the first pools built on a top floor of a high-rise building) and a never-ending climbing wall.

There were a couple of other facilites in Tower City and a FitWorks branch on Euclid somewhere, but I wanted a pool (I’m waiting for the HFC swimming instructor to recover from a sports injury, so I can try learning how to swim again) and didn’t go there. There’s also the YMCA, which apparently has the most impressive facilities including a pool, but that requires a drive to get to, and I don’t want to wind up driving everywhere. That whole urban sprawl-overweight thing, you know.

Posted on Sunday, October 24th, 2004 at 9:36 am and is filed under General, Cleveland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.