NYC Yoga Studios Archive Abstract – Visit Linktree

NYC Yoga Studios Archive is a digital archive meant to preserve the histories of yoga workers participating in the NYC Yoga industry in the year before, during or the year following the COVID-19 pandemic (December 2019 – December 2022). In March 2020, the World Health Organization commissioned that gathering in groups in indoors settings was one of the highest risk activities anyone could participate in, which almost immediately cast fitness venues as a COVID-19 hotspot. The circumstance of New York City being the United States’ most populous city per square mile meant that most yoga establishments in the five boroughs remained closed for in-person business for well over a year. According to an independent estimate, at least 63 out of 188 yoga studios have relocated or closed their physical spaces in the last 2.5 years for good in New York City alone and 22% of fitness venues have closed permanently in the United States as of 2021.¹ Additional surveys are finally emerging with affirming commentary and numbers that secure the place of digital fitness in the fitness economy due to the convenience of consumer technology, money and time saved and the looming fear of contracting the coronavirus while in group indoor setting.

The pandemic-provoked job losses and empty studio spaces combined with the mass digitization of yoga as a consumable product affects more than just yoga workers livelihoods and real estate, it affects the future of yoga and public health. The primary focus of this digital humanities project is to collect, protect and share the story of how the NYC Yoga industry functioned pre-pandemic and the yoga community’s overall response to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. The Omeka Classic site will showcase each studio on an interactive, geographical map with indication of the open, online, livestream or closed status, along with any publicly available data and/or contributed content in the format of textual documentation, drawings, lesson plans, images, audio or written interviews and reflections. Through an outreach campaign, the archive hopes to gather both spatial and narrative stories of how it felt for yoga teachers to work through the pandemic remotely or in-person; how the return to in-person work experience has been and the COVID-inspired use of alternative urban spaces for yoga classes. In addition to building a digital representation of what the NYC yoga community once was and it’s response to COVID, something else that the archive aims to help with is reconnecting displaced yoga workers with each other and to capture yoga’s continued culture of commitment to improving the communities that directly surround the area of the physical studio. Special importance and social media highlight will be prioritized to studios and individual teachers that have contributed greatly to social causes and to their local communities at their discretion. 

¹Club Industry staff, “22 Percent of Gyms Have Closed, $29.2 Billion Revenue Lost since COVID-19 Hit,” Club Industry, August 10, 2021, https://www.clubindustry.com/industry-news/22-percent-gyms-have-closed-292-billion-revenue-lost-covid-19-hit.