March 3, 2017 By Hannah Wulkan
A popular fitness center in Long Island City is closing its doors after two years in business.
The Workout Factory, a popular gym offering Pilates and fitness classes at 10-25 48th Avenue, will shut down on April 1 after losing its space due to a dispute over the building ownership.
According to an email sent out to members, the building landlord died in a car accident last year, and the building that the Workout Factory is in has been caught up in a legal battle over the sale of the building since his death.
Owners of the fitness center worked to resolve the situation for several months, but “Unfortunately, we just do not have the resources to continue fighting this and pay hourly lawyer fees to fight our cause as we are an innocent third party tenant caught in the middle of a buyer/seller legal fight. The bottom line is we lost the space, his estate will be selling the building and we have to vacate the premises,” owners Martin Kerestes and Zhana Galjasevic wrote in the email.
They wrote that due to the short notice of the move, they were unable to find another space in LIC, and will simply shut down, though they wrote that they may try to offer some of the classes in another location in the future.
Kerestes and Galjasevic also own The Yoga Room, a popular yoga studio that first opened its doors in Astoria in 2003, and later opened a second location in LIC. Clients at the Workout Factory are invited to transfer their class punch card over to The Yoga Room once it closes.
The Workout Factory is also offering several other options to clients caught off guard by its closing. They are running classes until the studio closes, and will prorate the final billing cycle to reflect the shortened period. For those with class punch cards, if they do not want to roll classes over to The Yoga Room, they can use the classes at other neighborhood fitness centers that the Workout Factory is partnering with, or they can get a pro-rated refund for the unused classes.
“We are obviously as saddened by this outcome as you are, but this is the only tenable course of action given the situation with our landlord,” Kerestes and Galjasevic wrote in the ema
