The Yogi Who Lives Over a Karaoke Place on St. Marks

“The students are everyone from a kindergarten teacher to Alan Cumming. You never know who is going to walk through the door,” Alex Schatzberg tells me when I meet him on the top floor of 9 St. Marks Place in the East Village, which is both where he lives and home to his New Vibe Yoga studio. It’s a cold day, but the room gets plenty of light, and he has the wood-burning stove going to keep it toasty. Schatzberg graduated from NYU in 2010 and started New Vibe Yoga a few years later. Charles FitzGerald, who owns several buildings in the neighborhood since first moving to St. Marks Place in 1959, offered Schatzberg a 1,600-square-foot live-work space in 9 St. Marks Place, an 1833 Federal-style building he bought in 1967 for $75,000. During the pandemic, when Schatzberg was unable to teach classes in person, FitzGerald had him take care of the place and gave him a break on rent. Despite there being a karaoke bar and restaurant on the first two floors, the street noise on the weekends is really his only issue.