Breather app helps you find a quiet place in NYC

In the hustle and bustle of New York it can be hard to find some peace and quiet. But now, thanks to a new company called Breather, there’s an app for that. “You go to a coffee shop, there’s no seat, there’s no outlet, you try to take an important call and there’s noise in the background. So what we want to do with Breather is give you a private space that you can kind of call your own for an hour or two, to work, meet or just relax,” Breather’s City Manager Packy McCormick said.

New York requires Herculean focus to accomplish even the smallest tasks. Honking cabs, construction, chatty coworkers, and the general inescapable din of life in Manhattan all conspire to prevent you from getting work done. Last week when I found myself in a cozy lounge in the heart of SoHo that I booked for an hour with an app called Breather, I had difficulty concentrating for a new reason: It was almost too quiet. Breather is billed as an Airbnb for work spaces; in this case, the analogy is fairly apt. The app offers quiet rooms in commercial spaces that you pay to use by the hour. (The “commercial” part also helps Breather escape Airbnb’s pesky legal woes.)