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The city is preparing to seek development proposals for a stalled Upper East Side site where a 16-story nursing school was supposed to open back in 2018.
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The New York City Economic Development Corporation bought back the 26,000-square-foot parcel at 524 East 74th Street, which runs through the block between York Avenue and the FDR Drive, for $43.1 million, according to a deed that appeared in the city register last Wednesday. The seller was an entity tied to the City University of New York.The deal actually closed on December 4, nearly ten months before the deed became public, Crain’s New York Business reported. Deeds typically show up in the register within a few weeks of a sale, and it’s unclear why this one took so long. Neither the EDC nor CUNY offered comment to Crain’s.
Now that it owns the property again, the EDC plans to solicit development proposals for the site, according to minutes from an April meeting of the agency’s real estate committee, as reported by PincusCo.
The site was once larger and for years housed a garage for city garbage trucks. The city split it into two lots and sold one of them to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2012 for $215 million. Sloan Kettering went on to build the 24-story, 757,000-square-foot David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care on its half.
The other half went to Hunter College, which planned a 16-story, 336,000-square-foot building for its Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing. Under that plan, Hunter would have given up its longtime nursing school complex at First Avenue and East 25th Street in exchange for the East 74th Street parcel.
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That building never materialized. CUNY reportedly changed course and chose instead to anchor the Science Park and Research Campus, or SPARC, a $1.6 billion biotech campus the city plans to develop at the nursing school’s old Kips Bay home. SPARC hasn’t been built yet.In the meantime, Hunter’s nursing school has moved to four floors at 60 West Street in the Financial District. CUNY bought that space in January for $40 million.
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