The sunny gratification of a New Love City yoga class
This light-drenched Greenpoint studio blends belonging & movement into a rewarding practice of play
Enrollment is open for New Love City’s Fall 2025 200 Hour Teacher Training.
The ascent of a four-story walk up might seem an unlikely path to enlightenment. But patrons of New Love City, a yoga studio tucked above North Brooklyn’s Greenpoint Ave, embark on this trek again and again in pursuit of a transformative vinyasa practice.
“The stairs can be a little daunting,” says owner and senior instructor Keela Williams. “I want people to feel really taken care of from the moment they walk up.”
The studio is an airy loft split into two distinct rooms, each clad in pothos leaves and hugged by walls of off-kilter white brick. Stalks of eucalyptus rest beside plush couches, while sunroofs transmit elemental textures from the sky above: the soft vibrations of a rain shower, warmth from a brilliant sun.
Between its thriving greenery and the hum of energy between practitioners, the space exudes a free-flowing serenity that calms the senses.
“I want people to be talking. I think it shows community and connection,” Keela says. “That's more important to me than quiet.”
Indeed, the space seems to serve as a sort of spiritual center. Listening to people converse before and after a New Love City class makes one thing clear: This is a place people come back to.
Inside the studio, thick floorboards of solid wood creak with character as yogis, new and seasoned, flow through asana sequences into surer versions of themselves. In the evening, disco balls splay dancing sprinkles of light, immersing the room in meditative drops of energy.
Beyond low-impact exercise, New Love City classes offer momentum — a way to churn stagnant energy into kinetic power. Instructors are encouraged to bring their own flair, Keela says. But at its core, each class is meant to blend breathwork, movement, and inquiry into a discipline of self discovery.
The only rules? Instructors must teach to all levels and primarily cue poses aloud, instead of demonstrating full class sequences.
“We really want students to embody their own practice,” Keela says. “That's kind of hard to do when you're looking to see what the teacher might be doing.”
She also acknowledges that people arrive with distinct abilities, bodies, and goals: “Their poses are going to look different than the teacher's pose — and different than their neighbor’s pose.”
This flexible approach to instruction across the studio’s roster of teachers means no two classes feel exactly the same. Keela maps this range of experience onto a spectrum, with Conor Yates — director of education, studio manager, and senior instructor at New Love City — on one side, and herself on the other.
Conor cues with an attention to alignment that makes every movement feel novel. Prop skeletons get cameos during reflections on evolutionary history, and anatomical terms are mentioned in the same breath and as often as Sanskrit.
But his precision is far from gratuitous. Resonant metaphors and quirky witticisms demystify yogic philosophy into something tangible, even obvious. That is to say, whimsy has a definitive home in Conor’s practice.
If Conor’s class is a satisfying New York-style cheesecake — rich, balanced, and foundational — Keela’s is tangy sherbet on a scorching day. You’ll find energizing flows, a faster pace, and more daring postures. Plus, it’s louder — music is central to her teaching.
“I don't play quote unquote yoga music — or whatever people would think yoga music is,” she says. “I want it to help them get a little bit lost in the practice in a way that their day sort of melts away.”
But Keela’s main priority is grounding her classes in a good time. She wants the experience to be rewarding and, at its core, enjoyable. At a time when people can log onto social media and watch practiced yogis effortlessly launch into headstands or contort their bodies, it’s important to Keela that nothing about New Love City feels intimidating.
“That’s part of the physical asana of the practice,” she admits. “But it’s not necessarily what yoga is.”
This desire to democratize yoga is also why she’s made the studio as accessible as possible. Besides standard monthly memberships and class packs, New Love City accepts credits from ClassPass. The studio provides mats, towels, props, and water to every practitioner, too.
“I don't ever want there to be a reason why they can't come, whether it's monetary or whatever,” she says. It’s a theme that comes up often during our conversation: “I don’t want there to be any barrier to entry.”
Keela got her start teaching yoga through a 200-hour training in Thailand. Her early days practicing in the country were formative and called upon strong creative instincts.
“How do you teach this person who's never done yoga — and English is their second language — what warrior one is?” she says of those initial months. “I really had to break down my teaching.”
Now, that accessible-to-all ethos gets passed along through New Love City’s own 200-hour teacher training, which the studio began offering in 2016.
“It’s a saturated market,” she admits. “What I can say for sure is that our trainers are the best of the best. That’s very, very important to me.”
Beyond teacher training and a standard class schedule, the studio offers additional programming, such as weekend workshops, outdoor classes, and monthly ‘One Album, One Hour’ sessions, where teachers select a record and design a sequence around its aesthetic arc.
But annual yoga retreats have emerged as a highly-anticipated fixture on New Love City’s calendar. Each year, the studio hosts trips to Thailand, Dominica, and upstate New York, among other locations. More than a wellness vacation, these getaways prove an opportunity to forge enduring bonds with kindred spirits.
“At all the retreats I've led, they've all come out making this really sweet little cohort,” Keela shares. “They have book clubs and brunches together.”
When asked if she has any repeat retreaters, her answer was conclusive: “Almost 100%.”
Timing played a pivotal role in how Keela came to own New Love City. She had been teaching at the studio since it opened in 2015 and declined pitches to partner with founder Jen Jones for years.
“You pick a path for life — then that path took a pretty big detour,” Keela shares of her circumstances during the time. At a routine anatomy scan for her and her then-husband’s first child, the doctors found a rare, terminal abnormality. She was 20-weeks pregnant.
“I don't think women have a platform to talk about miscarriage in a way that’s healing,” she says. “I remember going down deep Reddit holes to figure out if this had happened to anyone else.”
It was during this emotional upheaval that Jen finally struck a nerve. The studio officially changed hands on January 1, 2020.
After briefly gaining momentum under her leadership — Keela says that first month was the studio’s best to date — New Love City closed for 428 days due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To sustain the business, she offered online Patreon memberships and outdoor classes in Transmitter Park and relied on funding from the Pandemic Small Business Recovery Grant Program.
“In a way, it helped me get through,” she shares of how her grief and grit coexisted. “I had to just throw myself into keeping this alive.”
More than a responsibility, the studio became a lifeline.
“Not that it compares, but this is my child. The teachers are all my kids,” she says. “Maybe it was a godsend.”
On the whole, Keela believes people return to New Love City because it captures the elusive comfortability of a third space — not home, not work, but a separate social environment that satiates an intrinsic need for acceptance. Practitioners feel comfortable showing up exactly as they are, she says.
“People walk up the stairs, and they’ve had a bad day. They're crying. They're angry. New York just put ’em through the ringer,” she describes. “Or the opposite: They're really excited. They're happy. People bring their moms all the time.”
Ultimately, she’s most proud of her teachers and the community they help foster together: “They are the kindest, sweetest, most genuine human beings that you have ever come across.”
It doesn’t hurt that they’re talented, too: “Every time I take their class, I'm like, ‘Man, you guys are good.’”
New Love City is a woman-owned business located at 68 Greenpoint Ave Floor 4, Brooklyn, NY 11222. The studio is celebrating 10 years in business this summer.
Wonderful article, it sounds like such a cool place, and this is from someone who’s never tried yoga!
C'mon journalism! Love this, Lindsay!