Credit: The Boundary
After years in limbo, one of the Upper East Side’s longest-running construction sagas just cleared a major hurdle. A 20-story tower that’s been promised, stalled, and quietly reworked since 2015 has finally topped out — and when it opens, it’ll drop 60 high-end condos onto a corner that’s sat dormant for the better part of a decade. So what took so long? The short answer involves a stalled project, a quiet ownership handoff, and a developer whose name has since landed in the headlines for other reasons.
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The building is 260 East 72nd Street, and the firm now taking a bow is Sky Equity Group, run by Simon Dushinsky — a developer far better known for reshaping large swaths of Brooklyn and Long Island City than for anything on the Upper East Side. This is, in fact, his first condominium in Manhattan. Sky Equity took over as lead developer following a 2024 recapitalization; the Chetrit Group, which previously oversaw the site, isn’t mentioned in the announcement.When the Chetrit Group first filed plans for the corner in 2022, the pitch was a 53-unit tower on a lot the firm had been assembling since 2015, when it bought the parcel from SL Green for $47.3 million. The assemblage eventually swallowed a 19th-century Romanesque building at 252 East 72nd Street that once housed the Church of St. John the Martyr. A $235 million construction loan followed in 2023 — and then the project went quiet.
What changed in the interim wasn’t just the financing. Last fall, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office indicted Chetrit principal Meyer Chetrit on two felony counts of harassing rent-regulated tenants, according to The Real Deal, with his brother Joseph later added as a co-defendant. The charges concern a separate Chelsea building, not this one, where prosecutors allege the firm left two tenants in their 70s for years without heat, without a working elevator, and beneath a deteriorating roof in hopes they’d leave. The Chetrits have pleaded not guilty. It echoes the brothers’ early-2010s attempt to clear out the Chelsea Hotel — a saga that ended in lawsuits and a hasty exit.
Whatever the backstory, the building itself is going for old-money polish. Peter Pennoyer Architects handled the design, leaning on 1920s Upper East Side cues: a light brick façade trimmed in Indiana limestone, metalwork detailing, and stepped setbacks with private terraces, with Hill West Architects serving as architect of record. The finished product will hold 60 condos ranging from two to five bedrooms across roughly 161,000 square feet, plus a pair of ground-floor retail storefronts and an adjacent 10-story annex. Completion is slated for summer 2027, per New York YIMBY, with Douglas Elliman handling sales when they launch this fall.
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The selling point Sky Equity will lean on hardest is the one thing no developer drama can undo: the building sits directly across the street from the 72nd Street Q stop. For a neighborhood that waited the better part of a century for the Second Avenue subway, that proximity may end up mattering more than whose name is on the deed.Have a news tip? Send it to us here!
