A breakup during the pandemic sent him home to Long Island, where he recharged and decided the Upper East Side was just too quiet.
In the corner of Chris Keyloun’s new apartment downtown there is a disco ball resting in a large wooden bowl. It looks a little worn out, some of the mirrored rectangles cracked, others completely broken off.
“We’ve had some good dance parties,” Mr. Keyloun said. “I have a whole lighting system. This place can be a downtown disco, if you want it to be.”
Just a year ago he was living on 90th and York. “Nice and quiet,” he said. “And that was the problem.”
Mr. Keyloun grew up on Long Island reading New York magazine, and he was determined to move to the city, find the center of the action and throw himself into it. It was love that brought him to the quieter stretches of the Upper East Side, but that relationship ended — in the middle of a pandemic.
Initially, he wound up back in Floral Park, where his parents still live. “It was very much about picking up the pieces of my life,” he said. “And a shout-out to my family, who said, ‘Look, come home. Figure out your life. You’ll be OK.’”
Mr. Keyloun has been a CrossFit coach for the past four and a half years, so he spent a lot of time reconnecting with his mentors at his hometown gym, where he grew up and found himself: “I fell in love with CrossFit in the process of coming out and accepting who I was.”
After six months at home, he was ready for a restart in the city. He knew an old friend, Nick Craven, was moving up from South Carolina, and they decided to look for a two-bedroom together. Mr. Craven was still in Charleston, so Mr. Keyloun was in charge of advance scouting.
He looked at five apartments, all of them below 30th Street, one after the other. And as the day wore on, he realized that he had fallen in love with the first place. “I just remember walking in and I thought, ‘Wait a second, I’ve never seen ceilings this high.’”
It wasn’t just the 12 feet of airiness, but also the renovated kitchen and that rare two-bedroom apartment touch: two bathrooms.
The place is on a stretch of Elizabeth Street that could easily be claimed by a handful of neighborhoods. “Chinatown is right there,” he said. “Little Italy is around the corner. SoHo is right there, NoLIta.”
Mr. Keyloun has, at long last, found the center of the action.
“I’m in such a different mental state,” he said. “And I think so much of it has to do with this space. It’s because it’s mine: I chose to live here, which is a big thing and very different than living in my ex’s place. It a mess, but it’s my mess.”
He and Mr. Craven moved in last November and, so far, they are simpatico. “Neither of us is Type A,” he said. “We’re both relaxed, thank God.”
Half of $3,300 | Chinatown/Little Italy/NoLIta
Chris Keyloun, 27
Occupation: CrossFit coach
Favorite neighborhood bakery: “I’m always in Ferrara’s. I have to get rainbow cookies whenever I visit my family. God forbid I don’t bring them home, I get yelled at by my parents.”
Tattoos: “I get a new one every year for Pride. Some are funny; some are sacred. I’ve got the Keith Haring — two people holding up a heart. I’ve got ‘Darlin,’ my shout-out to Cristal Connors from ‘Showgirls.’ Look, I tell people I’m subtle — I’m not. Life’s too short to not make a statement.”
Mr. Craven works nights as a physician assistant at Weill Cornell Medical Center, and he is often just walking through the door when Mr. Keyloun is leaving for his 6 a.m. coaching session. They wave at each other in passing. “We’re not here at the same time too much to where we’re up in each other’s grills,” Mr. Craven said.
When they do have time together, it often involves two shared passions: attending parties and hosting parties. They did, after all, meet at a party during Pride 2017. “My friend group was at his pregame,” Mr. Craven recalled. They bonded over “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
There is a spareness to the apartment — not much hanging on the walls, a petite sofa and coffee table. They are still in the process of decorating, Mr. Keyloun said, but there are advantages to the place as it is: The minimalist furniture preserves coveted dance space, and the bare walls serve as screens for the acid-trip light show that Mr. Keyloun likes to splash across the room with his hand-held projector.
The apartment is perpetually moments away from a party. The speaker near the entrance to the bedrooms lights up even when it is not playing music. D.J. decks, nestled in a case, sit next to the sofa. A friend of Mr. Keyloun’s recently lent him the decks.
“I’m taking lessons,” he said. “The goal is to play at a big party. I’m on my way there.”
The dance floor is where he has made some of his most meaningful connections and met most of his friends: “Put me on a dance floor under a disco ball and pick me up in eight hours.”
It has been a slow buildup to a full party schedule in the wake of the pandemic. “It sucked moving up here when nothing was open,” Mr. Craven said. “Now I’m dead every night
Mr. Keyloun added: “Everyone’s on the street now. I almost forget what the winter was like.”
In recent weeks, he has been out in the neighborhood more, and his list of favorite spots is growing — Café Integral, Spring Lounge, Café Habana — but it was 218 Restaurant, his local Chinese food spot on Grand Street, that got him through the pandemic.
It remains his primary go-to. “It’s my chicken-and-rice place,” he said, “and they know me by name now.”
Sometimes he picks up an order for Mr. Craven, too: “I love that when I walk in, the woman there recognizes me, and she just looks up and asks, ‘One or two?’”
It’s a 13-minute walk to Union Square CrossFit, where Mr. Keyloun works. “Everyone calls me coach Chris on the street. I’m friends with all my gym boys. The running joke is that I’m the mayor of the gay mafia,” he said, laughing before adding under his breath, “I think it’s true.”
He said that knowing each person well makes him a better coach. “I see you on the street, I know what you’ve been through at work, I know what you’re bringing into class. And it’s not just the physical, it’s also what’s on your mind, what you’re dealing with. You’re sometimes someone’s therapist. There’s a whole lot of trust in my job — and I love that.”
He also loves that he doesn’t have to sit in an office and that he gets to wear gym clothes — although working out all day does mean endless laundry. Mr. Keyloun has little use for some of the practical amenities in the apartment. (“There’s an oven, which we rarely use but, hey, it’s there.”) The one feature he would never give up is the in-unit, stacked washer and dryer. “I go through a lot of clothes,” he said. “At least three outfit changes a day.”
That doesn’t include party attire, which is increasingly a factor as the city crawls out from under a pandemic. “We went from having nothing to do,” Mr. Keyloun said, “to here’s 10 parties on the same night, choose which one you want to go to. Me and my friends, we have a hard enough time saying ‘no,’ so sometimes we run ourselves into the ground. But in a fun way.”
There have been moments, somewhere in the mix between the 6 a.m. workout and the 10th party of the night, when Mr. Keyloun does collapse with exhaustion. Usually on the sofa, staring at the washer and dryer. Every now and then, he forgets to take off his mask.
“I’m so zoned out,” he said, “just sitting here thinking how nice it is to come back to this place.”
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