Over the past year or so, the commercial real estate industry has made it very easy for me to satisfy an urge I am not sure I will ever have. Within a six- or seven-minute walk from my apartment in Brooklyn, it is now possible to get to two indoor golf simulators — places where the purpose is to successfully whack a ball into a 10-ft screen that delivers digital replicas of famous golf courses and a soul-crushing lineup of metrics about the reach, speed and accuracy of any particular swing.
A walk a bit farther to the east, another half-mile or so, would land me at Golfzon Social, which, in addition to virtual golf, offers Tater Tots with bacon and a five-grain pilaf. Golfzon sits on the ground floor of 11 Hoyt, the Jeanne Gang-designed luxury condominium building that is around the corner from a city social-services agency that distributes EBT cards. If that disconnect proved too jarring, 15 minutes on a CitiBike would get me to the Gowanus Golf Club, opened in August by a 28-year-old Princeton University water-polo champion turned management consultant.
Indoor golf facilities have proliferated in the city during the past few years, in part because the pandemic boosted interest in golf generally. In 2023, according to the National Golf Foundation, a record 3.4 million people played on a golf course for the first time. In New York, the pandemic also left us with so much vacant office and retail space that has been hard to fill. Golf v. 2 on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights used to be a Mattress Firm.
Late in 2020, a local community group, the Brooklyn Heights Association, conducted a survey to determine what sort of stores people in the neighborhood most wanted to see in the empty spaces that were a problem even before the pandemic. When the people spoke, they said they wanted a specialty food shop, a fish store, a butcher. None of those materialized. Purveyors of farmstead cheeses, wild salmon and other staples of the bourgeois dinner table could not manage the rents. The dream of a small-scale food hall in a building previously occupied by an Ann Taylor Loft died when it was announced that a private-equity-backed veterinary chain was moving in.
A Covid test site which had been a candy store eventually became a med spa, the second on the street, the fast food equivalent of cosmetic dermatology. A few blocks away is a branch of Peachy, which bills itself as a dispenser of “preventative Botox.” After several rounds of venture-capital funding, Peachy now has eight locations in the city.
The leader of golf-simulator chains, Five Iron, does not have a Brooklyn operation yet, but it is looking for one. Across the country, there are 32 Five Iron locations with six in New York; a seventh, in Rockefeller Center, will open early next year. On Monday afternoon, I paid a visit to the outpost in Herald Square. It had been open since 2021, and at 2 p.m., it was totally full, with nearly every tee occupied by a man between roughly 25 and 60 and a soundtrack — Billy Joel, Christopher Cross — that seemed indifferent to the generational range. One player told me that he came several times a week, a pattern that his wife preferred to his giving over an entire Saturday to 18 holes played, anachronistically, outside.
During the weekday, people might spend 90 minutes hitting balls and then set up shop in the lounge, WeWork-style. At night there are corporate team-building events, bachelor parties, Tinder dates.
For the past 15 years, New York’s streetscape has been blemished, we complained, by bank branches and drugstore chains. “Not another Duane Reade!” you would say to friends over biodynamic wine or The New York Review of Books. But drugstores have been closing all over the city and the country because of contractions in the industry, the cash bleed from settlements stemming from opioid-crisis lawsuits and the wave of thefts that put baby formula behind locked plexiglass doors.
But drugstores, at least, are for everyone. The emerging streetscape seems poised to remind us that the city is really for the few. The simulator as hangout model is bound to grow as indoor golf becomes a spectator sport. With the debut in January of the Golf League, professionals will compete on simulators for televised audiences. The New York pro team is owned by the financier and Mets owner Steve Cohen, John McEnroe and Jimmy Fallon, among others.
When Jordan Colina, the owner of the Gowanus Golf Club, moved to New York in 2018, he was struck by how difficult it was to play golf in the city. He had grown up in California, where there are plenty of public courses and the weather consistently obliged, and his game was suffering. “I just thought, ‘Oh, man, I’m getting worse, not better,’” he told me.
He identified what he felt was a void in the market. “With the chains,’’ he said, “there was a focus on the social stuff.” To the serious golfer, stuffed Tater Tots and beer were not the point of a golf simulator. Eventually, Mr. Colina found vacant office space and built out the club, offering different tiers of membership. At the highest level, which costs just under $8,000 a year, you can play as much simulated golf as you want. When you get tired you can go buy a car. There’s a Tesla showroom just down the street.
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