We’re on the far western edge of Center City, in the 2400 block of Market Street, on a landing outside a huge five-story concrete-and-brick building that was once a Hudson Motor Car factory. He arrives wearing a groovy camouflage parka with a fur-trimmed hood and carrying two shiny black hard hats, the kind worn on construction sites by people who will never actually pick up a tool. That same day, I meet David Gutstadt at the actual place where he has chosen to create the future in the private club space. What do you have? You have a platform that can actually do good and effect change.” “You collect 2,000 or 3,000 of the most interesting, influential leaders, connectors, influencers across all segments of Philadelphia. Then he looked at the new Philadelphia he saw emerging and decided his new adopted city was ready for such a place. It’s got to be diverse and community-oriented. Got to have great restaurants and social space. Everyone gets to this moment in their life where the lightbulb goes off.”Īha! In that moment of enlightenment, Gutstadt asked himself: What would the club of the future look like?Īnd he answered: “It’s got to have health and wellness. “Watching all this - I’m sitting at the pointy end of the spear and saying this is an unbelievable confluence of lifestyle and design and hospitality all coming together.
It began to seem clear that people are increasingly willing to put more and more of how they experience their daily lives into the hands of trusted brands. Gutstadt was noticing hip private clubs like England’s Soho House establish successful outposts in New York, Los Angeles and Miami. So, he says, he spent five years “racing around studying hotels.” Meanwhile, out of the corner of his eye, he was seeing the explosive growth of the co-working company WeWork, which would soon diversify its offerings by moving into housing, education and fitness. But it took around 15 years.”) Shortly after the move, Gutstadt became a long-distance commuter, lured back to work in Manhattan by the CEO of the aggressively upscale fitness club operator Equinox and charged with developing a plan for the company’s move into hotels - er, the hospitality space. They were both athletes - he tennis she crew - and got acquainted during long training runs, even competing in a marathon together: “Eventually, what seems to happen to anyone who marries into a Philadelphia family, I ended up moving here. (“I met my wife in college at Princeton,” Gutstadt has informed me. “I’m a 20-year hospitality veteran.” About six years ago, he tells the crowd, he was ready to leave the hospitality finance game and move to Philadelphia with his children and his wife, the former Julia Dranoff, whose father, Carl Dranoff, has filled a lot of Philly space with apartments and condos. “I actually came out of the hospitality space,” Gutstadt says. “Fitler Club is what we believe is going to be the next evolution in the private lifestyle club space.” Someone like Gutstadt, a 42-year-old who has a degree in economics from Princeton and spent two decades working with top investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, might once have said he was in a business or maybe even a game - like “the finance game” - but in the current lingo, the goal is to try to occupy and command a “space.” You wonder if Elon Musk tells people he’s in the space space.
“I am the founder … in a new venture called Fitler Club,” Gutstadt says, talking into a wireless microphone that’s simultaneously amplifying and distorting his natural voice through a small portable speaker. Tonight is dedicated to the food and hospitality sector. Comcast is co-sponsoring a gathering of several dozen corporate and foundation do-gooders from around the country and spending a few days showing them how Philadelphia does good. It’s dinnertime on a bitterly cold midwinter weeknight, and cocktails and canapés are being served in the lobby of the sleek modernist box that’s home to Franklin Square Investments, which sits on Rouse Boulevard in a part of the Navy Yard development that despite being in the city feels like a suburban office park.