The Space Club Invasion

Space Club is the standout among a handful of indoor playgrounds that have opened in the last year, sprouting out of a crack in New York real estate that widened during the pandemic, when stores that sold stuff were replaced by those that sold experiences and empty office buildings and undersold luxury towers searched for retail tenants. It joins the ranks of Complete Playground (the city’s largest at 40,000 square feet, opened in a Wall Street office), Cocoon (Montessori-coded, one of the city’s most expensive at $670 a month, opened in the base of an Upper West Side condo), Hapik (rugged, kid-centered climbing gym, Industry City), and CREA (techy, looks like a video game brought to life, also Industry City). But Space Club is a phenomenon in itself — half McDonald’s PlayPlace, half Olafur Eliasson installation, built for selfie-ing parents as much as their children. On a typical day, its coat hooks fill with Moncler and Carhartt. Kids pass out on starfish-shaped pillows between runs across trampolines and jumps into ball pits. Moms thread their souvenir necklaces on the edge of the bead pool. (“Our children will find us,” one tells me.) Dads build towers in a room filled with hundreds of Space Club–branded yoga blocks. Even the celebrities are showing up. “Jeremy Strong and I played in the ball pit together,” a friend of a friend texted.

Behind it all is the artist CJ Hendry, who first became known for her works on paper: hyperrealistic grayscale drawings of Birkin bags and YSL shoes. But her real medium may be Instagram, where she has 859,000 followers. (Jeff Koons has only 521,000.) Never part of a gallery, Hendry started showing her work in custom environments that became spectacles, beginning with Monochrome, a kind of life-size dollhouse in which each of seven rooms was decorated in a single, blaring color. Hendry built an all-pink hair salon fit for Barbie in Blonde, an adult-size bouncy house for 2019’s Rorschach, and a ball pit turned treasure hunt for 2023’s Crown — where a line started forming at 3 a.m. before opening day. Last year’s Flower Market, which sold irises and daisies sewn out of Beanie Baby–esque plush, was so popular it was actually shut down by the NYPD.

Space Club grew out of Plaid, a 2023 show Hendry built around pencil drawings that aped thickly painted grids and hung on the walls of a long vacant space at the base of an industrial building in Greenpoint. The show also included an indoor playground — sized up for adults — with criss-crossing foam tubes and lattices of netting. A ticket cost $10. There were slides, trampolines, and pits of foam cubes. When the show closed, the team turned the art playground into a permanent business, which opened in the same space that fall. In addition to the slides and tunnels from Plaid, the crew built a bouncy house like the one in Rorschach and covered a wall of wigs to create the same effect as Blonde. They gave it a name — Space Club, a reference to the idea that kids need space. It opened that November.

It was a hit, quickly growing to take over a former Crossfit gym next door and making constant tweaks. Christina Allen, a Brit behind an Instagram account that reviews the city’s indoor playspaces, found an early choice at the Greenpoint location — a ball pit filled with wooden balls, burnished beautifully with Space’s whimsically hand-drawn logo — to be rather harsh as her daughter tried to play in them. “I think some of Space Club is geared toward the aesthetic,” she says. “But playspaces should be about the kids.” (The wooden balls have since been replaced.) At Fort Greene last month, Can Vu Bui, an architect, noticed that none of his daughter’s friends were drawn in by a pit of all-white Duplos, like a coral reef, bleached of color. But the design choices are thoughtful, even if not to one’s taste: “Many of the playspaces are designed like mini-casinos,” says Nick Rapaz, whose son is autistic and is grateful for Space Club’s sensory breaks.

Each location has darker, quieter spaces. This room filled with Space Club–branded floor pillows is also used for a members-only movie night.
Photo: Courtesy of Space Club

The Greenpoint location had an all-white bouncy house similar to what Hendry built for Rorschach, her show about mental institutions.
Photo: Courtesy of Space Club

Still, some parents flinched at the sheer velocity of Space Club as a branding exercise. Smoothies at the Greenpoint location are sold in star-shaped plastic containers that match the stars in the ball pit, and they can be sipped through a yellow star-shaped reusable take-home straw or, for the month of February, a red straw in the shape of a heart. For sale at the front desk: backpacks, basketballs, water bottles, and even Band-Aids, all branded with the hand-drawn logo. Admission comes with a pair of clean grip socks, designed in what employees call “colorways,” or stripes of stylishly clashing pinks and oranges and greens, which change seasonally, turning them into collectibles. The socks have apparently infiltrated a Pre-K class in Bed-Stuy. “Now we’re all wearing the same colors on our feet,” says Vu Bui, “and your kids will wear these socks to school and promote this brand.”

That marketing savvy turned off some critics when it came to Hendry’s fine art. (At her first immersive show, the New York Observer called her drawings an “afterthought” compared to the Instagram appeal to the masses, who could “mime taking a leak in the all-purple toilet.”) The parenting chats of Brooklyn can be even crueler. “It’s like vultures wanting to tear it down,” says one Fort Greene mom. “I can only think it’s because CJ Hendry is a really successful rich artist.”

Which may explain why Hendry declined to be interviewed for this piece — “I have had my time in the limelight,” she demurred. But she’s also never hidden her business smarts. In a 2017 interview, she explained that a day job at Chanel taught her to “understand branding.” She was good at it. “If I wasn’t an artist, I would be in private wealth or doing something in business,” she said. She’s done sponsorships from Louboutin and Clé de Peau, and she appeared in an ad for Lululemon.

It’s the kind of business sense one needs if they want to afford a lease for 36,000 square feet in Fort Greene. Rent is likely somewhere north of $40,429.48 — the price that the last occupant, a private school, paid in 2020 before it skipped a month during the pandemic and the number ended up in a lawsuit with its landlord. Permits for construction at the Fort Greene space on Waverly put the estimated work involved at around $254,000, though that only includes the rudimentary building, not the paint and fur and fun. Then there’s the biggest annual cost: liability insurance. A consultant who helps others launch indoor playgrounds said that it starts at $10,000 a year for the smallest, tamest spaces. “This is not a cash grab,” says Michele Caruana. “Ninety-nine out of 100 owners are not doing it to get rich.”

But maybe anything that takes off like Space Club is bound to attract scorn from Brooklyn parents who don’t want to see themselves in her business model, even as they post another Space Club Instagram Story and ogle the wealthier regulars. There are now 400 paying members who hand over Equinox prices — $299 per month for two adults and a kid, with $99 more per sibling and a $500 joining fee — for special access to events like movie nights, plus discounts on after-school care and a camp that’s opening up this summer, in time for a third location in Dumbo. Weekends are busy. Rainy days are insane.

A scarf cannon at the Fort Greene location and a slide in Greenpoint. From left: Photo: Courtesy of Space ClubPhoto: Courtesy of Space Club

A scarf cannon at the Fort Greene location and a slide in Greenpoint. From top: Photo: Courtesy of Space ClubPhoto: Courtesy of Space Club