The Tree

Tim Dale's previous career was nightlife: Eleven, Fumé, Undici, Eddie Jack's, the DNA Lounge, the Tap Room, the Up & Down Club. He was not a yoga teacher, and the studio he built reflects that. He has said he called it Yoga Tree because he wanted to embrace many different kinds of yoga and give good teachers a warm, safe, supportive place to teach.

That is a landlord's thesis rather than a school's, and it is the reason the place mattered. A studio organized around a single method recruits teachers who already agree with it. A studio organized around having good teachers accumulates them, and lets them disagree.

The rooms, as they stood at the 2015 sale: Stanyan in the Haight, the original, opened October 1999; Hayes Valley; the Castro; Potrero Hill; 6th Avenue in the Inner Richmond; and two in the Mission — Valencia Street and Shotwell Street. One more over the bridge in Corte Madera, and later a Telegraph studio in Berkeley, taken on from Yoga Mandala. The teacher training ran from its own center on De Haro Street.

Eight rooms and a school is not a large company by most measures. It is a very large yoga studio, and in a city of this size it meant that for twenty-one years a substantial share of everyone practicing was practicing at the same place.

Jason Crandell is the one I would put first and the one I most under-used: a contributing editor at Yoga Journal, named by that magazine among the teachers shaping the future of the practice, and I took 4 of his classes without knowing any of it.

Mark Morford is the detail I like best. He was writing the Chronicle’s Notes & Errata column and teaching vinyasa at the same studio, from the year it opened. I took 20 of his classes and never connected the two names.

Rusty Wells is the case that proves it. He was a teacher, program director and teacher mentor here before leaving in January 2010 to found Urban Flow and build Bhakti Flow Yoga into a book and an interpretation of its own. He is absent from my roster for the simple reason that he had been gone eight years by the time it was written.

Dina Amsterdam is the subtler case. She created InnerYoga and then left — but the method stayed on the schedule. My log has 13 InnerYoga classes, taught by 5 different teachers, none of them her. Whatever else a studio is, it is a place where a method can outlive the person who made it.

Jivamukti from Sharon Gannon and David Life. ParaYoga from Rod Stryker. Prana Vinyasa from Shiva Rea. Ashtanga from Richard Freeman, Maty Ezraty and David Swenson. Iyengar from Rodney Yee and the San Francisco institute. Sivananda from the ashram. Bhakti from the studio’s own program director. That is not a chain’s teaching staff; it is a conference that ran for twenty-one years.

486 classes across the six, with 65 different teachers. Stanyan — the original room — takes the largest share at 199.

Of the 18 names in the first table, I took classes from 7 of them, 59 classes in total. Which is the honest shape of it: I was in the building for four years and caught a fraction of what was in it.

On coverage. I searched every one of the 143 names on the roster. 39 of them have a public profile substantial enough to write down, and they are the ones above. The rest teach without one. That ratio is the real finding: a studio can hold a hundred-odd working teachers who will never have a Wikipedia entry, and still be the reason a city has a practice culture at all.

The 2015 sale is what made the ending possible. Yoga Tree kept its name, its teachers and its rooms, and to anyone on a mat nothing had changed — but the entity that could close it was now a company in Santa Monica with private-equity backing and sixty studios of its own exposure. When the pandemic took the whole sector down, the decision was made somewhere else, about something larger, and six San Francisco rooms were a line item in it.

A studio that had run for twenty-one years was closed by a filing in Delaware.

Former teachers formed the Yoga Tree Collective. Their statement of intent is modest: “to stay connected and to share information about upcoming offerings and new studio spaces.” There is no studio. Students book directly with each teacher.

That is what an institution looks like after it dissolves into the people who made it. Of the 25 names I could read from their site, 19 are on the December 2018 roster and 14 taught me personally, accounting for 89 of my 486 classes there. Their site was truncated when I read it, so those are floors, not totals.

In April 2022, HAUM — a queer-owned studio founded by Danni Pomplun — took the keys to 780 Stanyan Street and opened its second location in the room where Yoga Tree held its first class in 1999.

Pomplun taught me 51 classes, which makes him the third most-attended teacher in my whole record; 10 of them were in that building. The room I used more than any other was reopened by one of the people who had taught me in it. I did not know that until I went looking.

The pattern is worth saying out loud. Every room that is teaching yoga again was taken on by teachers or by a small local group, never by another chain — the same shape as the Collective. One room left the practice for good and became a bedding shop. The Valencia room only looks like an exception: the city borrowed it for four and a half years while it rebuilt a 1916 library, and hands it back to a yoga studio in early 2027. Corte Madera and the Telegraph studio in Berkeley are outside what I checked.

Two kinds of evidence, and they should not be confused. The history is researched from public reporting. The numbers labelled my log come from files in this repository: a booking export of 486 classes I attended at six of the studios, and a staff roster of 143 instructors captured in December 2018. The second is the more unusual document — a complete list of who was teaching at a studio group that no longer exists.

Caveats worth stating. The San Francisco Chronicle's report on the closure is paywalled; I have it only through other outlets, so the “hibernation” framing is second-hand. The Collective's teacher page was truncated when I read it. And an attendance record is evidence of what I booked, not of everything that happened in these rooms.

• SFGate — Tim Dale branches out with Yoga Tree
• Wanderlust — Meet the owners of Yoga Tree San Francisco
• Hoodline — YogaWorks buys Yoga Tree (June 2015)
• SF Chronicle — Bay Area Yoga Tree studios go into ‘hibernation’
• Yoga Journal — YogaWorks files for bankruptcy
• Athletech News — YogaWorks files Chapter 11, plans to close all studios
• Yoga Tree Collective
• Hoodline — New studio at the old Yoga Tree location (May 2022)
• The Castro Room — about
• Folk — locations
• Hoodline — Brooklinen opens in Hayes Valley (August 2022)
• San Francisco Public Library — Mission branch, temporary location
• Lotusland Yoga SF — on the move to 1234 Valencia