New Work City is closing its coworking space at 412 Broadway on June 30. If you’ve got questions, we’d like to give you the answers here:
Why are you closing the space?
The lease at 412 Broadway expires June 30. We (Peter and Tony, the leaseholders and partners in New Work City), decided a while back that we wouldn’t be signing a new lease. For the community to continue living onward, it need to do so in a way that didn’t depend on us as individuals in the same way that it has up until now.
That’s different from saying that we wanted to stop doing coworking. We looked at a lot of ways to continue keeping things rolling in a way that would allow us to shift our role. To some extent, we have succeeded in that, forging relationships with other coworking spaces around town. More on that later on in this post.
Are you going to build a new space?
We’d love to help build a new space, if the right partners present themselves!
If someone out there wants to build a coworking space with the same kind of ethos we espouse, we are ready to help them in every way we can, and we can help in a lot of ways. We hope to find these people and work with them.
Did you try to find people to work with to keep the place open?
We did! For months we met with other coworking space owners, aspiring coworking space owners, and other potential partners.
We thought we’d found the perfect collaborators in Tanooki Labs, a software consulting firm based at New Work City and headed up by good friends of ours. We decided to collaborate on an effort to build a new space that would be primarily their headquarters (they’d be the leaseholders) and secondarily a home base for New Work City, but couldn’t find the right deal in time for the end of our current lease.
What does the community think?
Some folks are sad. A lot of folks moved on a long time ago. For a long time the number of former members of New Work City has far outnumbered the number of current members; while we’d love to have a group of folks who want to stick around forever we’re in a city where people are constantly moving upward and onward. Times change, and people adjust.
Ultimately, a lot of us are just going to miss the place we built at 412 Broadway and the good times we had there.
What happens to the members now?
We’ve arranged for their memberships to be honored at Impact Hub, Civic Hall, The Centre for Social Innovation for July into August to ease the transition. Beyond that, we are developing a network of like-minded coworking spaces in the city, so we’re going to be doing what we can to continue to help people find great communities to be a part of.
What’s next for Tony & Peter?
Peter is working with fellow coworker David Haddad on Open mHealth, which is doing great things to help make consumer health data (UP bands and the like) more clinically meaningful. David’s amazing and what they’re doing together is some really great work that’s going to help a lot of people.
Tony & Peter are working on re-imagining New Work City as a community of communities, bringing together coworking space owners and other organizers around the city to work together towards our mutual mission of better supporting the new workforce. The initial participating communities include Impact Hub, Civic Hall, The Centre for Social Innovation, DUMBO Startup Lab, Compound Cowork, St. Lydia’s Dinner Church, SHARED Brooklyn, Con Artist Collective, Makeshift Society and QNS Collective.
Tony is also working on developing Cotivation, an accountability and culture-building program for coworking spaces, with his good friend Susan Dorsch of Office Nomads in Seattle. Tony will also be working with his lady, Amy Segreti, on new projects around relationships, fitness, and work.
What’s replacing New Work City at 412 Broadway?
Currently nothing! The landlord is asking for $25,000 a month. If you’re interested in taking the space and using it for coworking or some other use, get in touch with us! We can hook you up.
I want to come to NYC to hang out in a great coworking space with cool people for the day. I used to go to New Work City for that. What do I do now?
Head to our coming-soon new website! We’ll be making it easier for you to see some of the coworking communities that are out there and what they have to offer, so you can find one that works for you.
What happens next?
We continue to help more people find great communities of people who will help them. Join our newsletter to learn more about the upcoming activities happening in all of the partner communities we are working with in NYC, and of course join for our party on June 27 to celebrate the launch of our new network and to bid farewell to our old space!