WRECK ROOM
It’s perfectly OK to smash stuff here — really
Aslow, creaky elevator descends to an industrial basement lair in Midtown. One cementfloored room there is filled with discarded electronics and furniture, from scanners and fax machines to chairs and desks. They are all destined for total annihilation. And I am the annihilator.
This is the Wrecking Club, a 4-month-old venue that allows patrons to smash and shatter secondhand furnishings and office equipment with a metal baseball bat, crowbar or sledgehammer. The aim, says Wrecking Club creator Tom Daly, is to help New Yorkers destress in a safe and fun setting.
Daly, a 29-year-old Greenwich, Conn., native who left a lucrative finance job last year to start the Wrecking Club, helps me select a high-back chair, a bulky printer, a clunky laptop and some glassware. A desk completes the mock-office setup.
“I wanted to leave the corporate world,” he tells me as I don the required safety goggles and hard hat. “I wanted it to be something fun and different and wild and sort of outside the norm. It’s my break-out-of-the-system business.”
To help get me in the mood, Daly plugs in his phone, places it in a protective box by the door and blasts a soundtrack that includes Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Weezer’s “Hash Pipe.”
Ready to rumble, I heave a heavy crowbar above my head and, letting out a primal scream, slam it down. Shards fly off the printer; wood splinters off the chair and the desk. I give the bat a try with a few hard swings. A laptop becomes unrecognizable after several hits.
I feel energized, powerful, even liberated while wreaking havoc. Happy, too, after my 30-minute session. That may be a cause for concern.
After calming down, I talk with Elaine Ducharme, a clinical psychologist in Glastonbury, Conn., who specializes in trauma and abuse.
She reassures me that the Wrecking Club’s controlled destruction could be truly cathartic, just like other forms of exercise.
“For some people, when they’re really angry and frustrated, doing something angry and physical makes them feel better,” she says. “Other people, who have real anger problems, get this good feeling when they’re punching. They may not limit it, and when they get home, they may be more likely to smack their kid or smack their wife ... We have to be careful [because] fun violence can beget real violence.”
The basement, whose exact address Daly e-mails to customers once appointments are confirmed, currently accommodates only about 100 customers per week — to maintain a speak-easytype vibe, Daly says.
He says wreckers are equally divided between men and women, and he sees a lot of couples trying it out for dates.
“I don’t think you’d forget the guy or the girl who brought you to Wrecking Club,” Daly says. “It snaps you out of your routine real quick.”
The experience costs $20 for the first half-hour for one or two people, and each item Daly — or one of the “destruction waiters” on staff — adds to the room costs $10 and up. An average experience runs between $80 and $100.
On my way out, feeling embarrassingly gleeful, I pass one of the basement’s few pieces of décor that doesn’t get ravaged on a daily basis: a poster from the 1999 film “Office Space,” in which three protagonists take out their rage on a printer.