In ordinary times, the opening of a gym in Lower Manhattan might not occasion much reflection, but these, as it happens, are not ordinary times. We are in a moment of class warfare, of punishing the rich for their triumphs of asset management, or so the right labors to convince us. To believe this is to miss the extent to which class warfare is more than a political tool; it is an intimate social reality whose perpetrators come not from the vast aggrieved bottom.

The most recent and illustrative examples of this come dependably from the annals of New York real estate, where owners in the elegant, prewar London Terrace apartments in Chelsea, for instance, would now seem to wish to keep renters in adjoining buildings from using an indoor pool that for decades has been a shared luxury of the gentry and leasing classes. At the same time, on the Upper West Side, a place of parody liberalism, a building management company moved not long ago to bar rent-regulated tenants from using a new gym intended for those paying whatever the market demanded. This isn’t the first time a residential gym has been subject to this kind of hierarchical factionalism — if you’re not paying $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, we invite you to get fat.

These disputes point to a thriving dichotomy in New York, the inclination among many of us to decry economic inequality even as we live with and accept, either by will or by default, significant economic and social segregation. It is for this reason that the experiment underway at the Manny Cantor Center on East Broadway — an effort to convene the well-off, the middle class and the poor, the neighborhood’s 90-year-old Jews and 30-year-old Chinese immigrant mothers — seems almost mythic, the resurrection of a city that exists now largely in fantasy.

The center, which recently underwent a $55 million renovation, has a large and impressive gym to which fees are paid on a sliding scale. Families living in one of the area’s many public housing projects pay $10 a month; those living in one of the neighborhood’s many middle-class co-op developments, built by labor unions in the middle of the last century, might pay more; and those living in $2 million lofts in the building that used to house The Jewish Daily Forward pay the top rate of $87 a month. The gym opened a few weeks ago, and so far the project’s intent would seem to have been realized, with approximately a third of members coming from public housing, a third coming from the co-ops and a third from luxury properties on the Lower East Side. Art classes at the center will have a similar fee scale.