As others leave for flashy gyms, regulars at City Climb hold tight to the scrappy spirit that first drew them to climbing.
On a cold winter night, members of the Yale Climbing Team file into the bottom floor of a warehouse on the Farmington Canal Trail. Inside, fluorescent lights reveal a cave of gray walls covered with colorful, chalk-smeared holds and painter’s tape.
The team is fond of the gym despite its rundown facilities. “City Climb is a dank, dark hole,” says Quinn Ennis ’26, captain of the team. “But it’s a friendly dank, dark hole!” Founded in 2012, City Climb was once New Haven’s only climbing gym, and the center of the city’s eclectic climbing community. However, with the 2023 opening of Ascent Climbing Gym and Rock Spot, two better-resourced gyms, City Climb is no longer the city’s premier climbing facility.
Climbing is a rapidly growing industry: the Climbing Business Journal found that the number of climbing gyms in the US has doubled since 2013. Grand View Research estimates that the climbing gym industry was worth $3.3 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow by over 9 percent annually over the next five years.
Ascent and Rock Spot offer higher-quality equipment and nicer amenities than City Climb. Locally owned Ascent has a sauna, weight lifting equipment, and a coworking space. Rock Spot, an east coast chain, boasts floor-to-ceiling windows and the latest MoonBoard, a customizable training board with light-up holds. These gyms charge monthly membership fees of $95 and $84 respectively, while City Climb charges $62.
City Climb has found itself unable to compete with Ascent and Rock Spot, particularly in one key area: routesetting, the arrangement of holds into climbing routes on the wall. “The setting at Rock Spot is the best, full stop,” says Jonah Heiser ’25, one of City Climb’s setters. At the corporate facility, with its soaring walls and a plethora of holds, practiced setters are able to create better routes that challenge climbers to develop new technical skills and movement patterns.
Mike Augustine, City Climb’s co-owner, hopes to improve the gym’s routesetting. But, at present, the gym’s predominantly tall, male setting team tends to set routes which favor climbers of a similar body type. For instance, the“crux”—or most challenging move—of
many routes is a move between distant holds; these moves mainly test climbers’ strength and power. Augustine admits that City Climb lacks routes that prioritize balance, precision, and technical footwork, and he says that the lack of diverse setters is a problem across the climbing industry.
City Climb’s appeal lies in its low prices and unabashed quirkiness, which corporate-owned gyms in major cities lack. Each route is named by its setter, often something humorous or whimsical. “Nelson’s Noodles,” named for one setter’s dog, traces a path across the ceiling. “A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut” is a long trail of round blue holds.
“Voodoo in the Subaru” zigzags up the back wall.
“It was definitely the least posh gym I’d ever been to,” says Jared Stolove GSAS ’28. “But I liked its neighborhood-y charm.”
Augustine believes that the gym provides a space for people to unite around a shared activity, including those who feel like misfits elsewhere. He describes the gym’s climbers as “slight oddballs, in the best way”—including himself, he says with a laugh.
Some longtime climbers lament that the sport has been corrupted by consumerism. According to Delaney Miller, a three-time national championship winner, what began as “a niche sport of soul seekers and dirtbags” has become mainstream, largely due to the rise in corporate gym ownership. Miller wrote in Climbing Magazine that climbing gyms have “lost their soul.” To her, the soaring walls, aesthetically appealing routes, and fancy amenities of corporate
gyms represent their homogenization. She believes gym owners have sacrificed individuality for a replicable gym model proven to maximize profit. In doing so, they have set in motion the decline of climbing’s counterculture spirit.
Greg Lowden, Rock Spot’s regional manager, pushes back on this critique. He points out that the expansion of the climbing gym industry allows more people to access the sport than ever before.
Augustine remains agnostic on the trend of corporate gym ownership. His gym has suffered since Rock Spot and Ascent entered the market, with membership falling by 30 percent, but he acknowledges that there are advantages and disadvantages to the corporate model. Corporate gyms typically have more resources, he says, but they are less connected to their specific communities. City Climb offers events tailored to local groups in New Haven, such as schools and veterans’ groups.
Not everyone finds City Climb’s limited facilities charming. Mazie Wong, who coaches City Climb’s youth competition team, is frustrated with the gym’s limitations: its short walls, subpar setting, and low budget for competition expenses
Competition climbing routes typically feature large holds across tall walls of varying angles, which City Climb lacks. The gym is not an ideal training facility, and this sometimes negatively affects the kids’ team’s performance at competitions, says Wong.
Wong worries that poor competition results harm the kids’ sense of self-confidence. Like City Climb, the youth team is tight-knit, quirky, and under-resourced. Most of the kids feel out of place among their peers at school and at climbing competitions. To Wong, if the kids see their team performing poorly at competitions, they may believe they should conform to the “elitist and heteronormative” culture of competitive climbing.
“I want them to believe that defending their weirdness is worth it, and the space I have to do that is climbing,” Wong says. “But my job is just so much more difficult because of City Climb.” Without the tether of a competitive team, many ambitious climbers have left City Climb, seeking better facilities. Heiser, who sets routes at City Climb, bought a membership to Rock Spot in September 2024. He hoped to improve his endurance leading up to an outdoor climbing trip, and the training boards at Rock Spot offered easy circuits that could be repeated endlessly. “I never want to see City Climb go out of business, because it’s nostalgic, my home gym, and the reason I climb now,” he says. “But that wasn’t enough to keep me climbing there.”
More of a recreational club than a competitive team, the Yale Climbing Team remains loyal to City Climb. The two share a symbiotic relationship. During the school year, the team makes up about a third of the gym’s memberships. The team is able to offer generous City Climb’s overhanging bouldering walls. financial aid to its members due largely to City Climb’s low membership fees. If gym fees were higher, the team might have to move to a competitive model, holding try-outs and limiting its membership. Ennis knows some climbing teams work that way, but, as he says, “it’s not our ethos.” The team welcomes all.
Each year the Yale Climbing Team holds its annual “Lock-In,” a team-wide sleepover, at City Climb. Around midnight, a toilet paper fashion show kicks off—a zombie bride, a scantily clad firefighter, and a poorly wrapped mummy run down the length of the gym to cheers and hoots of laughter. Not much sleep occurs. Instead, the team keeps climbing.
— Aiwen Desai is a junior in Timothy Dwight College.