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Party City shut the doors on its Upper West Side store in early 2025, part of a national wind-down that took the chain’s entire fleet of stand-alone shops with it. Signage for the next tenant is now up, and a reader who spotted it sent over a photo. The business moving in isn’t a retailer at all.
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PureGym is taking the space at 660 Columbus Avenue, on the corner of West 92nd Street, where Party City closed last year. The chain’s page for the site is already live and marked “coming soon,” with a form for neighbors to register interest, though no opening date has been posted yet.
Photo: Alex Goldberg (@alexg0ldberg on Instagram)
If the name doesn’t ring a bell, that’s because it hasn’t been here long. PureGym is a British company, founded in 2009, that now runs more than 700 gyms across the U.K., Denmark, Switzerland, the U.S. and the Middle East. It got its American foothold by buying Blink Fitness out of bankruptcy in late 2024 for $121 million, then spent the following year renovating and rebranding those clubs. Fifty-six of them opened under the PureGym name across New York and New Jersey in December, according to a late 2025 press release. Every one of those was a converted Blink, which makes the Columbus Avenue location a bit of a departure. It’s a new site rather than an inherited one, and it’ll be the chain’s first on the Upper West Side. The closest current locations are on West 116th Street and West 125th Street.
The business model is what the industry calls high-value, low-cost, which in practice means low monthly rates and a big equipment floor instead of boutique classes and amenities. The 92nd Street page advertises plans starting at $22 a month, and PureGym currently lists three tiers across its U.S. locations. The $22 plan is the cheapest, but it commits you for a year, covers that one gym only, and carries a $40 signup fee. Month-to-month with no commitment is $30 a month plus a $20 signup fee. The top tier runs $39 a month with a $10 signup fee, also commits you for a year, and covers all of the company’s locations plus four guest visits a month. So the advertised “no contract” flexibility is real, but it’s only on one of the three plans.
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PureGym says the location will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with free weights, cardio machines, a functional training area, and certified personal trainers available to hire. The company has also told investors it plans to keep expanding, targeting more than 60 new gyms this year across the U.K., Switzerland, and the U.S. Its American profits climbed 65% in the first year it owned the Blink portfolio, Athletech News reported.As for Party City, it did make it back to the neighborhood, just not to its old corner. The brand reopened inside Staples at 2248 Broadway this spring as a shop within the existing store, part of a national partnership between the two companies.
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