We’re Talking About Practice: Gather Athletic Club Brings 3 Studios, An Open Gym & A Lounge Under A Single Roof
The team that launched Everybody Fights is back with a fitness concept custom built for the neighborhood at 1900 Market Street.
Pass by the glass-front of 1900 Market Street, find the signs for Schweiger Dermatalogy, and then find a single door by itself on 20th Street, titled Gather.
Short hall, stairs, left, right. Down, down, left, right, and we SWEAR, we’re giving directions and not entering a cheat code. Then the corridor opens up and you’re in an athletic club that’s been living under 1900 Market, in one form or another, since January 2019.
Gather Athletic Club is down here now: three fitness concepts, an open gym, a member lounge, and locker rooms we’d happily shower in. The kicker? Co-Founder Reid Eichelberger built this space out once already, back in 2018-19, when there were no walls and no floors. Now, he’s came back and did it again.
He Was Here When There Were No Walls
Reid came to Philadelphia explicitly to open an Everybody Fights back in 2018. He’d been with the company in Boston, where it started life as The Club by George Foreman, and yes, George Foreman had another successful business beyond grills (honestly, that dude was an amazing entrepreneur but not sure about his kid naming skills). Reid helped open the second Boston location and became the chain’s head brand trainer.
Then they sent him here, to a slab.
“This entire building was just unfinished concrete,” he told us. “There were no walls. There was nothing.”
He stayed through all of it. “I saw the walls go up. I saw the floors go down. I received the equipment. I hired the staff. I trained the staff.” The club opened in January 2019 and had cleared a thousand members by the December he left to go open more gyms up north. But then…you know what happened next.
The pandemic took out pretty much the entire franchise. This basement went dark for some time before 10 Hands moved in around 2022, but they left quietly at the end of December 2025. And that left the space empty again.
Reid, who hadn’t left Philly, heard about 10 Hands closing, and called Brandywine to ask what the plan was. Their answer, more or less was that they’d like to not have it, once again, a very large, very empty space.
Leaning Into the Vibes
Most people would spend countless hours trying to transform a space that would try to trick you into thinking you’re not underground. Reid decided to lean into it.
The stairwell was left moody on purpose. And the 20th Street tile is real, directly from a subway platform (we didn’t ask how). His aim when he opened the Everybody Fights Philadelphia location, and now it its new chapter as Gather is “Philly grit mixed with some finer boutique touches in a pretty good Center City location.” And then he gets to the part he likes saying out loud: that being in a basement is the point, given how chaotic everything is up at street level.
“It’s sort of like a little bomb shelter,” he said. “When the world goes crazy, please come this way.”
And honestly, we hadn’t thought about it before but hey, it never hurts to have a back up plan.
Three Spaces Under One Roof
The area dedicated to strength training is the foundation for Gather.
Up to nine people can start together with warmups and plyometrics. Then come the major lifts and an auxiliary block with a short sprint-style burnout at the end. “End on a high note, call it a day,” is how Reid puts it. And with one group being able to start every 20 minutes, severyone in a different phase of the same workout, and nobody stands around waiting.
Next door, ten treadmills face ten floor spots and you switch between them in the workout. Programming runs on a three-day progressive cycle: Monday and Tuesday are the same workout, so there’s no need to come to both, and the dumbbells in the tread room are deliberately light. He wants that room chasing cardio and this room chasing strength, “rather than people trying to combine all of their training into one hour.”
The third room is the boxing studio with nine stations, three people apiece, three of them heavy bags, two-and-a-half-minute rounds, the whole room sliding around together until it’s done. It was the most popular class Everybody Fights ever ran in this building, and Reid didn’t overthink bringing it back.
The Open Gym
The open gym sits along one side of the tread studio, and opposite from where the strength training classes will take place.
The open gym have everything what you’d want it to have: Dumbbells running all the way up to 100 pounds, squat racks, cable machines, a lat pulldown, a chest press, skiers, etc. The layout is the part that stuck with us as everything’s grouped by movement pattern
About ten people could probably fit comfortably. This isn’t the main event, and it isn’t trying to be; it’s the floor for days you’d rather skip class and do your own thing.
The Walls That Didn’t Come Down
In the studios, and on the way to the locker rooms, there is no such thing as a boring wall.
Even when Everyone Fights had closed, and the space changed hands, the murals stayed put. When Reid walked back in this year, he didn’t think twice about removing the murals. “There’s a story here,” he said, standing in front of one of them. We said we’d come back because we love a space (or club, in this case) with history.
A Locker Room Worth the Walk Down
Six showers per locker room. Hair dryers. The old steam rooms are getting converted into saunas, too. White subway tile, caged industrial lighting, and it all looks pretty damn good.
There are also a ton of lockers with no locks required, hooray!
A Room to Chill in
One of the amenities? The member lounge called Grounded. We walked in expecting a nice area with seating but we found an actual living room. Leather sofas, gray armchairs, lamplight, a long table you could camp at with your laptop. Plus grab-and-go food is coming!
And it exists because people asked for it. Plus, the room is also going out for rent for workshops, brand launches, and team building events. “The event industry is popping off,” Reid said, “and people need spaces to do their own thing.”
Opening, and the Leap of Faith Behind It
Membership is built the way a yoga studio builds it: unlimited monthly, smaller recurring monthly memberships, class packs, and (soon!) ClassPass. Reid is pretty open about why there are so many doors in. “We need all the different options for all the different ways that people spend money.” He’s equally direct about where that money lands: “You’re not paying for the amenities. You’re paying for the quality and community.”
Gather isn’t venture-backed. There’s a small group of investors, a landlord Reid has known for years, and a plan to grassroots it and owner-operate it, which he considers an advantage rather than a limitation. There’s also a lease with his wife’s name on it and a 15-month-old at home.
“I don’t sleep well anymore,” he told us near the end of the tour. “I used to be a really good sleeper.”
We have to admit, we love a comeback story — especially one where the guy doesn’t just rebuild what was here, but builds what the neighborhood needs now. So do what we did. Take the stairs, and go say hi to Reid and the team at Gather!
