Retail Roundup: Club Pilates coming to Melville, Miller Place, Lake Grove
Joey Sherman-Hessel of East Northport works out during a class at Club Pilates in Commack. Two more locations of the fitness chain are planned for Long Island. Credit: Johnny Milano
If you can’t find a place to work out on Long Island, you’re not looking — at all.
Three more fitness studios are headed to the Island — to Meville Mall, Miller Place and Lake Grove — as Long Island’s gym boom continues.
In April, a Club Pilates will open at the Melville Mall shopping center on Walt Whitman Road/Route 110, said David Wolk, the studio franchisee. The studio will be one of the tenants in a new 15,000-square-foot building under construction adjacent to the existing strip of stores in the shopping center.
It will be the third Club Pilates franchise owned by Wolk, who opened a studio in Woodbury in January and one in Commack in December 2017.
“I got into this because I love fitness and it’s what I’ve studied for quite some time,” said Wolk, 44.
The Dix Hills resident has a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and exercise sports science from Penn State and used to design rehabilitation programs for college athletes recovering from injury-related surgeries.
The Club Pilates at Melville Mall will occupy 1,753 square feet in the new building. The only other tenant that has been named for that building is an AT&T store, which is slated to open by the end of this year.
"Pilates is one of those rare forms of exercise where you don't feel like you're punishing your body," says Club Pilates franchise owner David Wolk. Credit: Johnny Milano
Melville Mall’s existing retail building is about 250,000 square feet and its tenants include off-price department stores Macy’s Backstage and Marshalls, grocer Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace and Dick’s Sporting Goods. (The Write Stuff, a card and gift shop, was also a tenant in that building but it closed in September after 38 years of business, which I wrote about last month.)
Also, another Club Pilates franchise will open in January at 159 Route 25A in a shopping center called Miller Place Commons.
The space, formerly occupied by a bank, is about 2,000 square feet, said Peter Elliott, vice president at Meridian Commercial Management Inc., the Farmingville-based management company for the shopping center’s landlord.
David Goldstein will be the franchisee for the Club Pilates in Miller Place, as well as one planned for Smith Grove Shopping Center, at 139B Alexander Ave. in Lake Grove, said Jessica Yarmey, spokeswoman for the Irvine, California-headquartered chain.
The Lake Grove studio should open by late summer, said Daniel Glazer, a vice president in the Jericho office of Ripco Real Estate Corp. who is the exclusive broker on Long Island for Club Pilates’ parent company, Xponential Fitness.
The Lake Grove studio will occupy about 2,000 square feet that were part of former Circuit City space, which has been vacant for about 10 years, he said.
Club Pilates studios specialize in “reformer Pilates.”
Designed by Pilates founder Joseph Pilates, the reformer is an apparatus with a flat sliding platform, called a carriage, from which exercisers do resistance training with pulleys and other attachments.
“Pilates is one of those rare forms of exercise where you don’t feel like you’re punishing your body. But you walk out and your body feels incredible,” Wolk said.
The Club Pilates locations will be among a host of fitness studios that have popped up on Long Island in recent years.
Record numbers of retail stores nationwide continue to close as customers move to online shopping, so malls and shopping centers are courting tenants, such as gyms and restaurants, that aren’t hurt by website competitors.
Between the third quarters of 2014 and 2018, the number of fitness and recreational sports centers on Long Island increased by 45 locations, or 10.3 percent, to 483, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
At least two dozen have opened or will open on the Island this year alone.
Founded in 2007, Club Pilates is a boutique fitness studio chain that is experiencing fast growth nationwide.
Of the 600 locations in the country, 155 have opened this year, Yarmey said. About 60 more will open by Dec. 31.
There are eight franchises on Long Island, including studios in Oceanside, Garden City and New Hyde Park.
Retail Roundup is a column about major retail news on Long Island — store openings, closings, expansions, acquisitions, etc. — that is published online and in the Monday paper. To read more of these columns, click here. If you have news to share, please send an email to Newsday reporter Tory N. Parrish at tory.parrish@newsday.com.
Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.
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