In Pasadena, the Real Workout Comes in Finding a Club

In the booming downtown fitness scene, where thousands hold memberships in local health clubs and gym owners have plans to accommodate thousands more, some exercisers are finding their workout options as slim as the waistlines they hope to achieve.

Two major downtown fitness clubs have closed--one permanently--in the last 13 months, and a third has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy while it scrambles to complete its hi-tech facility.

Displaced fitness buffs face an 11- to 12-month wait if they want to join the long-established Pasadena Athletic Club.

And although two other upscale downtown clubs--Brignole Fitness Training Club in Old Town and The Club at Plaza Las Fuentes, newly opened on the fourth floor of the Doubletree Hotel--are accepting new members, both are reaching their membership quotas at a time when the demand for convenient workouts has never been greater among downtown workers.

“There’s not a lot of options around. A lot of people are fleeing to wherever they can flee to,” one South Pasadena woman said recently, as she changed into her leotard and headed for aerobics class at the Executive Fitness Club, which is open despite its Dec. 20 bankruptcy filing.

The crunch started roughly a year ago, when the aging downtown YMCA closed. To modernize the decrepit building across from City Hall and fortify it against earthquakes would have cost $12 million, and preservationists objected to razing both the YMCA and YWCA for a joint new complex. The Y tried to raise money for the project, but the battle drained so much money from the fund-raising effort that not enough was left to proceed with plans for a new YMCA-YWCA, said David Livingston, general director of the Pasadena YMCA network.

The mats pulled out from under them, 1,300 YMCA members searched for other downtown workout sites.

Some turned, naturally, to the closest low-cost alternative, Nautilus Plus. But that too closed--at the end of January--turning between 2,000 and 3,000 members over to the Executive Fitness Club until a greatly expanded Nautilus Plus is built at 45 Arroyo Parkway, perhaps by midsummer.

Executive Fitness Club, slated to open more than a year ago, could have accommodated former YMCA members as well as others in the downtown area, but construction and money problems delayed the opening. People who signed contracts for $804-a-year memberships sued when the club wasn’t ready on time.

The club opened partially in July, 1989, and had its official opening in January, a month after its Chapter 11 filing.

Industry officials say the current demand-heavy, supply-short fitness picture in Pasadena won’t last. Sensing a gap in a blossoming marketplace, there are weight rooms and aerobics floors on the drawing board.

Brignole Fitness Training Club in Old Pasadena has 2,000 members and can accommodate only 200 to 300 more, but plans an ambitious expansion that would add 50% more space and greatly increase its membership capacity. There is no date set for the expansion.

Owner Doug Brignole, a former Mr. America and Mr. Universe, is negotiating to buy an adjacent 5,300-square-foot building that used to house the Career Opportunity School Barber College. He wants to add a steam room, massage area and new locker space, especially for women. “When we opened,” he explained, “I didn’t expect nearly the membership among women.”

Now, with women making up 40% of the people sweating on his leather-upholstered equipment, Brignole has moved out of his office to make way for a child-care room and he intends to replace the women’s tiny two-shower locker room.

With antique and bare-brick decor, $30- to $40-an-hour trainers, five manufacturers’ lines of equipment and a spring-loaded aerobics floor, Brignole is a gym for serious and/or wealthy athletes and a healthy crop of beautiful people.

Meanwhile, Nautilus Plus’ new club, under construction in a cavernous, gutted, 24,000-square-foot building on Arroyo Parkway, will offer quantity: a 4,000-square-foot-plus aerobics floor, 25 Lifecycles, 25 Stairmasters and 2,000 square feet of free weight space.

The Club at Plaza Las Fuentes in the Doubletree Hotel is already capitalizing on the demand for downtown gym space. Offering an intimate, low-key atmosphere, it has been open since Dec. 29. In one large, sunlit room, trainers who know everyone by name offer tips on form as a few people work out on rowing machines and Stairmasters. There are no aerobics, since the hotel did not want to add noise, said Lynne Velling, who directs the hotel’s publicity.

The club’s developers “see it as a little more private and exclusive. It’s not a sweatbox,” Velling said. Several corporations have signed up groups of their employees, to give them a substantial break on the $175 initiation/$25-a-month fee.

Club Manager Kevin Kuwae said groups of members from Paine Webber brokers, the city of Pasadena, Kaiser Permanente and other large downtown corporations have recently signed up.

Even the YMCA has what Livingston calls “hopes and dreams” of one day building a large, modern facility near downtown.

“There’s no question that if we were downtown in a nice facility right now, it would do well,” Livingston said. “The need is there.”

But for people such as Katherine Seibert, a Pasadena mother of two, the need is going unfilled. A Nautilus Plus member, she’s tried driving to the South Pasadena YMCA (too far, and her children didn’t like the child-care room), Brignole (she was dissatisfied with the aerobics) and Executive Fitness Club (no free parking, and what she considered a crowded, too-public aerobics floor facing plate-glass windows on Colorado Boulevard).

“I’ve resorted to using a tape, but it’s just not the same,” Seibert said.

“I’m in limbo right now,” echoed Hilton employee Pam Koerber, 28, who was also a Nautilus Plus member. A weight room to open in July at the Hilton will be for guests only, she said. At $450 a year, Brignole is too expensive, she said, and the aerobics classes at Executive Fitness Club look jammed to her.

“Now we’re all squished into Executive Fitness Center,” Pacific Bell employee Kate Flynn added.

Jim Meeks, the first vice president of the Community Bank in Pasadena, was an avid YMCA exerciser and is still bitter that it closed. “It was a sorry day in the history of Pasadena,” he said. But he was able to join the Pasadena Athletic Club because his wife already had a membership there.

Others face a much longer wait to get into the 65-year-old club, which offers hotel rooms, a pool, racquetball and tennis courts, weight rooms and private trainers ($30 to $35 an hour) child care, parking and classes in everything from ballet to yoga. Despite the long waiting list, the club is “worth waiting for,” athletic director Elaine Riley said.

Membership chairwoman Paula Faul said that she refers the 550 to 600 people on the waiting list at any given time to various nearby clubs. “We have no formal agreements, but there are clubs I will refer to, that are well-maintained and taken care of, and some I won’t.”

Unfortunately, Riley said, there aren’t enough clubs around at the moment to provide everyone with what they are looking for.

“It’s really too bad,” she said. “A lot of these people have nowhere to go.”

Meanwhile, people looking for a bargain can consider the YWCA downtown. Men are welcome in most areas, and although the building is antiquated, it does have a pool.

“We’re the best-kept secret in Pasadena,” fitness director Nancy Robinson said.

Bates is a Los Angeles free-lance writer.

WORKING OUT IN DOWNTOWN PASADENA

Brignole Fitness Training Club

Price: $450 a year

Free Parking: No

Child Care: Yes

Aerobics: Yes

Steam Room/ Sauna: no

Pool: No

Members: 2,000

Club at Plaza Las Fuentes

Price: Individual: $175 initiation, $25 a month; Corporate: $125 initiation, $25 month

Free Parking: No

Child Care: No

Aerobics: No

Steam Room/ Sauna: Soon

Pool: Yes

Members: 120

Executive Fitness Club

Price: $99 initiation; $19.95 a month

Free Parking: No

Child Care: Yes

Aerobics: Yes

Steam Room/ Sauna: Yes

Pool: No

Members: 2,700+

Pasadena Athletic Club

Price: Single, $300 initiation; $43 a month; family, $400 initiation; $65 a month

Free Parking: Yes

Child Care: Yes

Aerobics: Yes

Steam Room/ Sauna: Yes

Pool: Yes

Members: 2,000

YWCA Downtown

Price: $35 a year plus class fees

Free Parking: No

Child Care: No

Aerobics: Yes

Steam Room/ Sauna: no

Pool: Yes

Members: 1,800