A Tuesday in March, just past 9 p.m., on Lafayette between Houston and Bond. Merge Pilates is still lit — bodies folded into expensive discomfort behind glass. The bar on the corner has space; the coed bathhouse next door has a line. Across the street, a club takes phones at the door — sticker over the lens, no photos.
Call it the L.A.-fication of New York. For years, it was a punchline — the imagined Erewhon in SoHo, the 5 a.m. run club, the $22 mezcal cocktail — until it stopped being a joke. The city that spent decades looking down on Los Angeles is now importing its social architecture: members clubs, wellness temples, curated privacy, the morning as the new night.
New York has been quietly absorbing California habits for decades, whether it be through its cuisine or workouts, its surfer fashion or plastic surgery. The pandemic didn’t invent this newer shift; it accelerated it. An Angeleno landing at JFK can now run a week of L.A. habits without altering a thing, hitting the same grocer, the same Pilates studio and the same private club — and often running into the same faces.
The condiment shelves at high-end Tribeca grocery store Meadow Lane.
Plexi Images/GHI/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Along the way, the city also absorbed a particularly L.A. fascination with being out in public while remaining essentially unseen.
The clearest expression is the private-club boom. Soho House had the formula first and let it slip — too many members, too visible. San Vicente Bungalows reset it in West Hollywood: tighter lists, stricter rules, total phone control. Now the model has been rebuilt in New York — Zero Bond, Casa Cipriani, The Ned, Aman — a lattice of doors that close behind you. The new status is the night with no evidence.
Wellness has absorbed what used to be nightlife. Othership and Bathhouse host ice-and-sauna socials where people meet in towels instead of Celine suits and slip dresses. Remedy Place, the cold-plunge-and-IV-drip social club founded by an L.A. transplant, sells membership the way WeWork once did. Sobriety, or something adjacent to it, has reset the clock. The social peak isn’t midnight; it’s 7 a.m., when running clubs replace the after-hours.
San Vicente West Village.
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times/Redux
Even grocery stores have gone Hollywood. Meadow Lane, the Tribeca grocer launched by TikTok-fluent heir Sammy Nussdorf, runs a boutique-Erewhon playbook: beige minimalism, celebrity smoothies and prices high enough to provoke outrage and guarantee a line.
Recent New York transplants from L.A. J.J. Abrams, his daughter, Gracie
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images; Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
“Wellness has definitely become more visible post-pandemic,” Nussdorf says, describing customers who are “more intentional about where they spend time” and drawn to spaces that feel “calm, curated, somewhat removed from the noise.”
He pushes back on the idea that this is simply Los Angeles transplanted east. In New York, Nussdorf says, it feels less like a lifestyle identity and more like a series of habits folded into the rhythm of daily life. That may be true, but the underlying behavior is familiar: a preference for environments that manage exposure and reduce friction, even as they present themselves as distinctly local.
Liana Levi, founder of Los Angeles-based Forma Pilates, which has opened an outpost in New York.
Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images
At Kith Ivy, that logic reaches its endpoint. Ronnie Fieg’s new West Village padel club ($36,000 initiation, $7,000 a year) will, as confirmed this spring, house the first Erewhon outside California: a tonic bar pouring juice from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. The dream of an Erewhon line in SoHo matured into a five-figure membership and a waitlist for court time. The line didn’t disappear. It just moved behind a gate.
Even dinner has gone quiet. On the Lower East Side, new openings mirror Abbot Kinney: wood-fired, seasonal. The red-sauce rooms remain, but as heritage. The clothes tell the same story on either coast — Khaite in West Hollywood, The Row in Tribeca. Once, New Yorkers dressed for the night; now they dress for the body — Alo, Vuori, the Equinox uniform, the GLP-1 silhouette underneath — worn straight through dinner. The city no longer looks like it just left a meeting. It looks like it just left a workout and decided that was enough.
It’s not just the aesthetics moving east. Power is bringing its habits with it. Gustavo Dudamel — American classical music’s closest thing to a movie star — has taken the New York Philharmonic’s podium. Bad Robot is relocating, a subtle but telling shift in gravity. J.J. Abrams is no longer just passing through, he’s putting down roots, moving around the city with his daughter, Gracie Abrams, who’s been quietly accumulating New York real estate like she’s trying to replicate L.A. scale within Manhattan constraints.
Conductor Gustavo Dudamel
Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
One could argue this is what every expensive city looks like now. But Los Angeles dictated the contemporary grammar: It built a social life around controlled access, private entrances and the understanding that being seen should be a choice, not an accident. New York spent decades rejecting that notion. It is embracing it now, fast.
What’s disappearing is the unscripted city — where proximity did the work of a publicist, where a night could still surprise you because it wasn’t prescreened and preapproved. The two cities that used to define each other are becoming one. The difference, increasingly, is the weather.
This story appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
