The Man Who Made Working Out Cool

 

In the center of the lobby, presiding over it all, was David Barton himself. In his 20 years as the bodybuilder-in-chief to downtown celebrities and partygoers, he has morphed into a kind of self-created cartoon superhero.

At 5 feet 5 inches tall, Mr. Barton is so hugely, broadly muscled that he appears almost cube-shaped. His thatch of brown hair was spiked and shellacked, his ample, exposed biceps tanned a blood-orange. He wore a chain dripping with silver fake razor blades, a tie-dyed sweatshirt revealing his bulging pectoral cleavage and stacked-heel boots that put him at eye-level with his female employees.

“We call this Victorian punk,” Mr. Barton, 46, said of the décor in his raspy, staccato, Mickey Rourke voice, his right biceps spasming, as it constantly does. “It’s like some punk rockers took over an old East Village church and made it cool.”

Few things at a David Barton gym look uncool. Since Mr. Barton opened his first gym in Chelsea in 1991, he estimates that he has grossed $230 million with six fitness centers in New York, Miami Beach, Chicago and elsewhere that feel more like nightclubs (noirish lighting, live D.J.’s, spalike locker rooms) than workaday gyms.

But recently, Mr. Barton has “failed out” — bodybuilder jargon for not finishing a workout set. In December, he confirmed news reports that he was separating from Susanne Bartsch, the nightclub promoter and his wife of 15 years. In January, two former trainers filed a harassment suit alleging that managers called them anti-lesbian names and made offensive jokes about sex toys. Then a month later, the company announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and partnering with Meridian Sports Club, a group of mid-priced gyms in California, to help restructure $65 million in debt.

“I don’t know how to answer,” Mr. Barton said, when asked about his current state of mind. It was a remarkable admission for a hard-driving, self-promoting man who, as a 20-something personal trainer, built a fitness empire with “a pillowcase full of money.” Added Mr. Barton: “Nobody ever said this business was going to be a cakewalk.”

DAVID BARTON grew up in Queens and New Jersey, the son of a Shell executive and a United Nations secretary, but he made his mark in Chelsea, where he still lives and works.

His first gym, in the unlovely basement of a 1970s apartment building on West 15th Street, was an instant hit among the neighborhood’s burgeoning gay populace. It featured a relentless house-music track, lush spotlighting and wall-to-wall mirrors that seemed to magnify a culture of muscle worship.

“I’d never worked out before, and that gym pretty much changed my life,” said Amanda Lepore, the transsexual party hostess whose surgically enhanced body Mr. Barton has featured in ads. Mr. Barton would let Ms. Lepore and other downtown club figures work out free in exchange for the buzz. “David showed me that I could sculpt my body with weights,” Ms. Lepore said, “which is better than plastic surgery, because you can control it more.”

Other clubs followed on the Upper East Side and in other cities, including Miami Beach, where the opening of the David Barton gym in the Delano hotel in 1995 helped brand that hotel as one of South Beach’s hot spots and where, later, its move to the Gansevoort South was seen as something of a coup for that hotel. Toned down somewhat from the flamboyant Chelsea original, the subsequent locations still succeeded in defining an entirely new kind of gym experience, one that felt as much like hitting a glitzy party as logging an everyday workout.

“David Barton created the prototype of the gym-as-nightclub that has been widely imitated,” said Taylor Hamilton, a senior analyst covering sports and fitness for IBISWorld, a market research company. “They’re probably the highest cachet gyms in the U.S. other than Equinox.”

In 2004, Mr. Barton fulfilled a dream to move his Chelsea flagship to a higher-profile site: the former McBurney YMCA, a century-old landmark on West 23rd Street. It became his most nightclubby gym, with the weight room swathed in theatrical shadows, D.J.’s pumping dance music at night and a fiber-optic light show in the steam room.