Northwest Athletic Club is a defunct fitness center chain in Minnesota. In August of 2006, Lifetime Fitness purchased all of the Northwest Clubs. Currently, Lifetime is in the process of remodeling all of the former Northwest locations – and thank goodness – they need it! Apparently, the owner of NWAC ran the clubs into the ground because if you walk into a former Northwest club, you’ll take a step back to the ’80s that would make Jane Fonda blush. Dingy lighting, neon decor, ripped brown wallpaper, padlocked, rusty lockers with chipped elementary-school colored paint, and just a general dated feel to the clubs.
However, for some reason, Lifetime did not want the Brooklyn Center/Hwy 100 Club, and chose to shut ‘er down. Doing a little bit of research, I discovered that this club closed shortly after Lifetime’s acquisition, so it would’ve been around August 2006.
Why was this club shut down? Was it in THAT bad of condition? Were its members leaving in droves to lap the nearby Brookdale Mall at 6am instead? Did the pool have a yellowish glow in the water? With basically no full service health club options in the area, it’s not as if its members were leaving for the competition. Perhaps circling the Brookdale Mall interior was a better option than this poor health club.
I snapped all of these photos in July 2007, as it was being taken down by a wrecking crew.
Damn. I passed it!
As of today, the scene of the destruction remains empty.
A NWAC advertisement from 1999
Sure, there’s apaceplaza.com and a few entries on DeadMalls.com, but other than that, there isn’t much information out there. Hopefully this site will change that!