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Few buildings on the Upper West Side have crammed as much into the last few years as the ten-story brick tower at 117 West 70th Street. It’s been a dormitory for aspiring Broadway performers, a shelter that housed hundreds of asylum seekers, and the site of a tragedy that drew citywide attention. This month, it picked up its newest chapter — and it comes with an eight-figure price tag.
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The building, the former Stratford Arms, has sold for $80 million. The buyer is Beverly Hills-based Hawkins Way Capital, according to a deed filing made public Friday and first reported by Commercial Observer. The seller is the American Musical and Dramatic Academy — better known as AMDA College of the Performing Arts — which had owned the property since 1996 and operated it as its Stratford Residence Hall.Why the school decided to part with its dorm isn’t clear; spokespeople for both AMDA and Hawkins Way didn’t respond to requests for comment.
For longtime readers, the address may ring a bell. The Stratford Arms, originally constructed in 1928, spent years as housing for AMDA’s musical theater students before the city repurposed it in the summer of 2023 as one of two new asylum shelters slated to house more than 800 people. Its time as a shelter was marked by turbulence, including the December 2023 death of an eleven-year-old boy found unresponsive in the lobby. By late 2024, it was among the shelters set to close as the city wound down its emergency housing operation.
So what happens now? Hawkins Way has spent the past couple of years assembling a New York student-housing portfolio, snapping up a former DoubleTree on Lexington Avenue that it sold to CUNY for $125.6 million, a 492-room former Holiday Inn at 99 Washington Street downtown for $154.5 million, and a New School student-housing building in Chelsea for $30 million. The firm, which manages roughly $3 billion in assets, hasn’t said what it intends to do with 117 West 70th — but its track record suggests the building’s days housing students may not be entirely behind it.
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