In a transformed neighborhood, a funeral home gets new life as a gym – DNyuz

In Brooklyn, where neighborhoods continue to evolve, once-thriving businesses can disappear.

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

Created from the combined lower floors of two stately sandstone houses on a tree-lined block, the 3,500-square-foot gym replaces decades of dimly lit chapels, a coffin showroom and a smoking room for bereaved families.

The business, which opens on Friday the 13th, is one of the stranger examples of a growing trend in the city’s changing streetscape: boutique gyms popping up in neighborhoods where residents spend more time and money, far from the office towers of Midtown Manhattan. Commercial rents in several neighborhoods are still below pre-pandemic highs, while many stores are less reliant on central office districts than they were pre-Covid, in part because many New Yorkers are commuting to work fewer days a week. For some business owners, the shift has opened up a range of new leasing options in spaces they might not have imagined a few years ago.

Indeed, it was the market, not the macabre, that led to the gym’s unusual origins: a pact between a former undertaker, a Paraguayan model turned fitness coach and two local businessmen. Fate may have played a part.

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

A family business

Scotto Funeral Home has been a Brooklyn institution since its founding in 1926. Back then, home funerals were still common.

In 1947, the business opened at its old Carroll Gardens address, 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 a longtime undertaker and active in community politics. He campaigned for the cleanup of the Gowanus Canal and was “very instrumental” in choosing the name Carroll Gardens for the neighborhood long known as South Brooklyn, said Ron Schweiger, Brooklyn’s official historian.

The elder Scotto died in 2020 at age 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 was doing about 250 funerals a year and had expanded to a third brownstone to meet demand, Mark Scotto said. But change was coming.

Since 2000, the district that includes Carroll Gardens has become less racially diverse and much wealthier, according to Social Explorer, a data research firm that analyzes the census. The median household income in 2022 was more than $158,000, up 76 percent from 2000 and more than double the citywide median income.

And many of the families who had visited the business over the years have left, said Mr. Scotto, who ran the funeral home from 1990 to 2002. “This was a failed business model,” he said.

Against his father’s wishes, Mr. Scotto left the funeral home to pursue a career in real estate, leaving the business’s operation to family members. In 2018, faced with rising property taxes and declining revenues, Mr. Scotto said he was forced to close the funeral home (the business continues to operate in several locations in Brooklyn and on Staten Island).

The local boys

In 2020, as Mr. Scotto began remodeling, Nick Vargas, 40, a civil engineer and now personal trainer, wanted to start a gym.

A few years later, Mr. Vargas, who attended Public School 58, across the street from the funeral home, heard that the building was still looking for tenants after construction delays. He and his friend, Angelo Sasso, 38, a marketing executive who grew up in the neighborhood, 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 practice, was not convinced.

“He hung up within three seconds,” Mr. Sasso said.

But the couple was persistent, often stopping by the building 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 owned Rainbow Market, a neighborhood grocery store that has since become a board game store; he still lives above the store.

“I found out they were kids from the neighborhood and that’s when all the emotions came out,” Mr. Scotto said.

The deciding vote was Mr. Scotto’s wife, Jazmin Rojas Scotto, a chef and former model who hosted a fitness television program in her native Paraguay. She was already planning to run a small fitness studio in the building when she heard about the business partners’ proposal.

“Now we’re all buddies,” Mr. Sasso said — and neighbors. Mr. and Mrs. Scotto live with their children above the former casket showroom. And Mrs. Scotto joins the business as a personal trainer.

Real estate shuffle

After four years of hybrid work schedules and an uncertain office market, New York City’s commercial real estate market is still in flux, but there are bright spots.

According to Live XYZ, a mapping company, 672 gyms have closed in the city since 2020, but 585 have opened, the majority of which are in Brooklyn.

“Boutique fitness has definitely exploded,” said Greg Batista, a broker with Ripco, in contrast to some of the budget, big-box 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 is favorable for District, where memberships range from about $200 to $500 a month. Mr. Sasso said 1,500 people, almost all local, have signed up on a waiting list for access to the space, which can hold only a few hundred members.

But the decision to open in a former funeral home was also financial. The lease is about 40 percent cheaper than asking rents at some properties on nearby commercial streets, where starting rents were at least $30,000 a month, Mr. Sasso said.

“If you walk down the block, you would never think there was a gym,” said Msgr. Guy Massie, the pastor of nearby Sacred Hearts & St. Stephen.

At the request of the partners, 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 that 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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