‘I’m going to help people heal’: an indoor-outdoor bathhouse grows in Brooklyn

Liz Tortolani’s cityWell spa offers a laid-back boutique experience in the once-industrial but now trendy Gowanus neighborhood

Liz Tortolani can pinpoint the exact moment when inspiration struck. The New York-based massage therapist had been lugging dirty sheets down Sixth Avenue after her last client of the day and was about to descend into the subway. “The idea just kind of flew into my mind,” she says.

Tortolani would create a bathhouse whose atmosphere would incorporate five elements – earth, fire, water, wood and metal. And – more importantly – “I’m going to help people heal,” she recalls thinking.

It was the kind of salutary relief that Tortolani could have used herself some years earlier, after a grueling hospital stay in Seattle, a period she describes as her “rock bottom”. The entrepreneur, 46, has Crohn’s disease and has lived with chronic illness since childhood. When her condition flared up, she took time off from work to focus on recovery. “It was either die or get better,” she recalls.

A colleague helped Tortolani find the right cocktail of rest, acupuncture and hydrotherapy – including a whirlpool, steam room and sauna at a local women-only space that cost less than $20 an hour to visit.

Once the vision to create a similar destination on the east coast seized her, Tortolani was determined to see it through. She found a space on a quiet street in Brooklyn and launched cityWell – what she calls a “boutique bathhouse”. Located in the once-industrial Gowanus neighborhood, the establishment offers indoor and outdoor services spanning acupuncture, massage therapy, hydrotherapy and body treatments.

It’s part wellness sanctuary, part neighborhood haunt for other local entrepreneurs and residents. People can drop in at reduced prices for community hours or register for special events like soaks with live jazz and Shakespeare readings held in the back yard, a laid-back space with a hot tub, cedar sauna and the occasional visit from a stray cat. It was important to Tortolani that cityWell feel approachable to her fellow New Yorkers. Catering to an affluent segment of spa-goers was never part of her plan.

Women launched roughly half of US businesses in 2021 – a sharp uptick from 28% in 2019, according to a study from Gusto, a human resources cloud company. While cityWell’s 2015 opening preceded the pandemic, Tortolani’s vision is in sync with the current moment, when so many Americans are reconfiguring expectations around work, burnout and mental health.

While her business slowed to a crawl in the dark days of the pandemic, and cityWell even closed for a while, “Covid was one of those reset moments that helped us recognize the pace at which we were moving,” says Tortolani. Many of her clients came to realize that the pace of their lives was too fast. “A lot of us were barely taking time to stop and take care of ourselves.”

For Tortolani, the benefits of self-care extend far beyond the self. “If you come here and you feel a little bit better, then you’ll go home and you’ll be a little bit nicer to your partner or your kids. You might eat something a little better for you,” she says. “It might help you kind of go on your own path to feeling good.”

What’s your elevator pitch to a stranger who’s never heard of cityWell?

The mission is to provide affordable and accessible preventive healthcare to a wide range of urban wellness seekers. My vision was to make wellness and self-care part of everyday life, not just a luxury. I wanted to get people out of this idea that you can go to the spa only once a year, on your birthday. You can find a way to integrate it into your lifestyle – once a week, twice a month – because taking care of your body is about prevention as much as it is about healing.

How did the pandemic change your business model?

It put a halt to much of what cityWell was built on – community, affordability and accessibility. Having a space for outdoor massages set us apart, but we had to limit community sessions. Like most small businesses, it was like starting over. Closing forced us to recalculate and reorganize everything, but hopefully we’ll continue to bring back things that were integral to cityWell’s mission. People began to understand that having an outdoor massage is wonderful – not only for Covid, but because you can hear birds chirping and feel the breeze – different things they didn’t really connect with in the past.

Urban dwellers’ lives are so influenced by the built environments surrounding them. How do you think about the atmosphere you’ve created?

In New York, we don’t often have outdoor space, or bathtubs and nice showers. I wanted a place where someone could come and bathe in a really nice way. CityWell has this beautiful outdoor space with hammocks and cabins, hot tubs and views into apartment windows. We’re open year-round and get to be part of the seasonal changes. People might go to the park, but this is a bit more “neighborhood-y”.

When people hear words like “wellness” and “journey”, many roll their eyes and dismiss it as woo-woo, or presume it’s just another way to sell things to women.

There are different demographics in the wellness space. For one, there’s Goop, which has its own high-end demographic and also has morphed into clothes and other things – how you look, how your skin looks. On the other hand, when a lot of people hear the word “bathhouse”, they think of gay bathhouses, a space for gay men to gather.

I love the idea that people commune in bathhouses. They’ve been doing this for centuries. How do you make a really smart business model out of this? I wanted to try something that’s been happening since the beginning of time and people still do because it feels good. I wanted to ensure that young people, students, single women and hardworking New Yorkers could afford a bit of self-care.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqlqLavsdKsZmtoYmd8pbHCaGduZ5OewbrDxKWjZpqRqbWpu9SsnGafn6yur8HSZpmrp5%2Bgubq6