Gymnsia

Part 2 - `I'll never have to leave!'

by Michael Joseph Gross

Donna, my tour guide, is ecstatic. She gestures toward a bare room in the Boston Athletic Club, explaining that it will soon be filled by a franchise of Jae's Café. "Then I'll never have to leave!" she says. "I can eat here, exercise here, sleep here, work here."

Donna is not exaggerating. After a hard day at the office downtown, you can swing by the daycare center for your kids, jump on the shuttle bus from South Station, park the young 'uns in the BAC's "kiddie gym," and tear down the hall to the squash courts (or golf driving range, or swimming pool, or tennis courts, or basketball courts). After your workout, you can check on your mutual funds in sweat-spotted copies of the Wall Street Journal in the single-sex saunas, stop by the salon for that perm you've always wanted, plunk yourself down on a massage table and have someone do magic tricks with your trapeziuses, chow in the club restaurant, and -- how time flies! -- get the late news from Chet and Natalie in the TV lounge.

Amenities, clearly, are a source of great joy for members of the Boston Athletic Club. But the appeal of the BAC is more than the sum of its free toiletries. What's unique about the BAC, at least among gyms that cater to the downtown set, is that the club's sprawling physical structure completely swallows its members. The parking lot is as big as a Wal-Mart's; the front desk is equipped with more control panels and cubbyholes than a nurses' station at Beth Israel. Most important, the building itself -- a former lumber warehouse off Summer Street, past the Fort Point Channel -- is as windowless and womblike as a suburban shopping mall. Inside the club, there is absolutely no way of knowing what the weather is like outside, or where the sun is in the sky.

The Boston Athletic Club, big enough to get lost in, is a place where you wouldn't be happy unless you found a routine of your own. I shadowed several sure-footed folks around the place, all of whom nodded hello to a good number of compatriots in their chosen areas of interest. In this way, the club seems fairly typical of middle- and upper-class urban citizenship. Its patrons (including, according to one well-connected member, Boston's chief of police and at least one city councilor) are people with the confidence to know what they're about, the resources to sharpen whatever they've identified as their strengths, and a need for plenty of shelter and support in order to keep it all going.

Back to part 1 - On to part 3

Michael Joseph Gross is a freelance writer living in Boston. He can be reached at MJG25@aol.com.