New Work City is a coworking space and center for independents. Built as a community first and a business second, New Work City is the collective result of the participation of countless people who believe in its mission and subscribe to its values.

History

CooperBricolage

In the Summer of 2007, Sanford Dickert formed CooperBricolage, a coworking community based in Cafe Fuego in the East Village. Tony Bacigalupo helped get things started, and together they helped run events and grow the community.

In October 2007, CooperBricolage moved to Gramstand, where events and coworking would continue to run for the next year.

During this time, Tony and Sanford were actively working on figuring out how to establish a dedicated coworking space. In early 2008, those efforts became more focused, and on April 2, 2008, Tony launched nwcny.com and announced New Work City as the name of the future coworking space.

New Work City – The search for a space

The original splash page for nwcny.com was focused on rallying support for the concept. With sufficient interest, New Work City could become a reality. Over the course of the next several months, we worked on finding an appropriate space, building interest, and fleshing out the business model.

This took a really long time.

After looking at many spaces and having several deals fall through, we found the right deal– a sublet being offered one of Sanford’s friends, Jeevan Padiyar, in his company’s office. The environment was open and conducive to creativity and it was the right size, location, and price.

On September 25th, Tony invited anyone interested to gather at 200 Varick Street to check out the space and give feedback. The feedback reinforced our opinions on the space, so we moved forward to commit.

Grand Opening

On Saturday, November 1, 2008, New Work City opened its doors for a grand opening party that included coworking leaders from cities around the continent.

In the first week, enough members signed up to make New Work City profitable– and we were on our way.

NWC 1.5 – Greenspaces Edition

On May 1st, 2010, we moved to a beautiful space at 394 Broadway, Fifth Floor. For four months, we shared space with Greenspaces, an eco-focused workspace community who have been gracious enough to host us while we built our own dedicated space.

NWC 2.0 – A Home of Our Own

We spent the spring and summer of 2010 searching for, developing, and fundraising for our new, dedicated home. Thanks to a group scavenger hunt that had members scouring the city for potential locations, we found a charming little building on Broadway just south of Canal Street. The building has a single owner who believed in what we represented and did everything in her power to make it possible for us to move in.

Our community rallied support for the new space, raising over $17,000 from over 250 supporters on Kickstarter and worked with a variety of people and organizations, several of whom discounted or donated their services.

Thanks to that and the support of many others, we opened our new home on the second floor of 412 Broadway on September 1st 2010.

The new space has allowed us to expand our vision to include not only workspace, but dedicated event and collaboration space. This has allowed us to do even more to help people lead better independent lives.