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The six-story schoolhouse on West 85th Street that once held Manhattan Country School has drawn a potential buyer — another Upper West Side private school, just five blocks up Columbus Avenue, willing to pay $20 million for the empty building.
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That bidder is The Geneva School of Manhattan, a classical Christian institution at 138 West 90th Street. Geneva has put its offer on the 150 West 85th Street property in writing, according to bankruptcy filings reported by Bloomberg and Crain’s New York Business. The number is structured as a stalking horse bid, which sets a floor price ahead of a court-supervised auction. Competing qualified bids must come in by June 15. If none do, Geneva’s offer carries the day.Rim Hinckley, Geneva’s head of school, declined to comment.
Founded in 1996, Geneva takes its name from the Swiss city the school describes as a birthplace of classical education and a key center of the Reformation. The curriculum is built around what the school calls a “biblical framework,” with primary texts, Latin, music theory, and Singapore Math threaded through the grades. Geneva enrolls roughly 425 students from preschool through twelfth grade and charges as much as $36,000 in annual tuition. Its inaugural high school class graduated in 2025.
The mission is a sharp turn from the one that defined Manhattan Country School. Founded in 1966 at the height of the civil rights movement, MCS built its identity around social justice teaching, a sliding-scale tuition model, and a Catskills farm where students learned to milk cows and work the land. The model proved hard to finance. MCS bought the 85th Street property in 2015 for $28 million in hopes of expanding enrollment, draining its endowment and borrowing roughly $20 million through tax-exempt bonds to do so. The pandemic upended those plans, families left, and expenses outran revenue. By the time MCS filed for Chapter 11 last May, it had just over $82,000 in the bank.
ILTUWS followed the school’s collapse closely last spring, including the federal bankruptcy judge’s decision to reject a last-ditch emergency financing plan — a ruling that effectively sealed MCS’s fate. We also covered the emergency board takeover by parents and alumni in the school’s final weeks. The case later converted to Chapter 7 liquidation, and the trustee, Albert Togut, engaged broker Bob Knakal of BKREA to market the property. An earlier appraisal had pegged the building’s value at $39 million.
Geneva’s interest fits a national pattern. Classical Christian schools have grown across the country in recent years, and the model has picked up converts among New York parents who feel mainstream private schools have drifted too far in one ideological direction. Private-school admissions consultant Emily Glickman told Crain’s there is “clearly demand right now” for schools that lean back toward original texts, formal logic, and ethics-based instruction. She cited Emet Classical Academy, a Jewish classical school that opened on the Upper East Side in 2024, as another sign that families are looking for instruction grounded in Western and religious tradition.
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Geneva itself has been expanding quickly. Enrollment climbed about 43 percent between the 2020 and 2024 school years, according to the school’s most recent annual report — a striking figure given the wider decline in school-age children citywide. The school last year completed an 8,000-square-foot expansion that brought seven new classrooms, a science lab, an art studio, and offices online. It had been planning a more ambitious second phase that included an additional floor, a new roof, and elevator service, with a price tag projected near $18 million.If Geneva ends up with the West 85th Street building, much of that follow-up renovation could be unnecessary. Togut, for his part, has said publicly he hopes another school will end up with the campus.
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