They built an empire of yoga studios and homes with ‘living walls.’ Now they’re pandemic villains.
Gendville and Brooks-Church’s business ventures ran like a well-oiled, if extremely tenuous, machine. On the surface, they catered to the upper crunchy crust of Brooklyn, hawking imported wooden toys, prenatal-yoga classes, and rooftop gardens to gentrifiers with money to burn. But it was “yoga on the outside, pure capitalism on the inside,” as one former Area employee puts it. Behind the scenes, Gendville and Brooks-Church were exploiting the city’s growing underclass for a short-term, reliable cash flow: employees working without benefits and tenants paying up to $1,000 each for a single room in an illegal conversion. By this year, it appears, the landlords were pulling in nearly $10,000 a month at Dean Street alone.
