New Work City -- You'll Never Work Alone Again

February 11, 2009

Even though legions of people are now unemployed or freelancing, working from home can still make you feel lonely and adrift. Sure it's great not wedging into an F Train at 8 a.m., but having to order a triple grande latte just to be around others can be a high-calorie yet empty experience. Meanwhile, whole movies have been made of folks going crazy from the walls closing in. But never fear - these are not your only choices! Welcome to New Work City, a place where you can hang out, write, code, innovate, doodle, shmooze and network.

Nerdabout paid a visit to their office and chatted with NWC's founder, Tony Bacigalupo; we also met writer Laura Silver, Anthony Townsend from the Institute for the Future and Dana Spiegel from NYC Wireless. You can drop by and rent a desk for the day, or month-to-month (check out their membership options here). Best of all, you never know what's going to happen on any given day.

"We need to be around other people," says Tony. "So co-working fulfills that need. We've already seen lots of people going to coffee houses to work, but even there it's not quite complete—you're around other people but you don't really know who's working on something. It's weird just walking up to a stranger at Starbucks and talking." (Tell me about it - ed.) "What's nice about co-working is it's not just a social thing; once you're here you're around other people who tend to be like-minded, and the more you talk to each other about what you're working on, and brainstorm ideas, the more good things come out of it—whether it's finding jobs for one another or partnering on things or building new things.

"It's actually a phenomenon that's been noticed in co-working spaces around the world - the term to describe it is "accelerated serendipity"—which is to say, happy accidents that are sort of by design. So you don't know what's going to happen when you come here, but it's probably gonna be good." This reporter can tell you that my accelerated serendipity moment was seeing Björk on her cell outside the NWC building. Björk does not belong to NWC yet, but give it time ... Iceland could use some creative brainstorming.

NWC also hosts events and has a Meetup. So grab your laptop and pay a visit! You can even tell them Nerdabout sent you :)

Heather Quinlan

Comments

[Tony Bacigalupo]

Thanks for the great writeup Heather! Visit anytime.

John, if you'd like to come cowork after hours, we are running semi-regular after-hours coworking events on our Meetup page: http://www.meetup.com/coworking-nyc

Feel free to join!

[Lizard of Awes]

Thanks for this post Heather, I work from home and didn't know about NWC.

[john]

almost makes me wish i didn't have a job...