Senate Democrats via Wikimedia Commons
There is a building on the Upper West Side that has been a Chrysler showroom and repair facility, a piece of the New York Times printing operation, and the New York campus of a major television network. It went up in the 1920s, built around a spiraling car ramp that’s been kept and repurposed.
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The building is 125 West End Avenue, the eight-story block-filler between 65th and 66th Streets that housed ABC from 1985 until early 2021. After the network left, we reported in 2020 on plans from Taconic Partners and Nuveen Real Estate to convert it into a life sciences hub, a 400,000-square-foot lab building eventually branded West End Labs. Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation just purchased it for $190 million, according to Fortune, and his plans for the block go well beyond what is standing there now.
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Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation paid $190 million for 125 West End Avenue and has signed a contract to buy the adjoining building at 320 West 66th Street for another $70 million, the outlet reported. Factor in additional development rights the foundation is also acquiring, and the finished complex could approach 700,000 square feet, close to double the size of the current building.
The plan is to convert it into the Ackman Oxman Institute, a brain research center named for Ackman and his wife, the designer and researcher Neri Oxman. Ackman told Fortune the institute will bring together researchers working on genetics, nutrition, longevity, and rehabilitation, and that the complex will include space for neurosurgery. It is being developed with Mount Sinai. If the full buildout happens, it would rival or exceed the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and most other major medical research facilities in the city.
Ackman said the project traces back to February, when his 26-year-old daughter suffered a brain hemorrhage and survived after a series of experimental treatments at Mount Sinai. He and Oxman had considered a brain research institute for years, since losing her mother to Alzheimer’s, and had looked at this exact building once before and walked away because the real estate and staffing costs did not work. A slump in the life sciences sector changed the math.
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Readers here know Ackman’s name for different reasons. In 2021, he proposed a glass penthouse addition atop 6-16 West 77th Street, a plan that drew significant local opposition and was told to scale down before it eventually won approval in 2022. In 2024 he listed his apartments at the Beresford for $19.9 million, roughly $2 million below what he had paid. He has also become one of the more prominent political voices in American business, including his campaign against Harvard’s leadership. More recently, he has been a steady critic of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he spent heavily to defeat, though he congratulated Mamdani on election night and offered to help the city.That history is worth keeping in mind, because a project of this size will almost certainly come back through the neighborhood. The parcels changing hands are the same ones that fueled speculation about a new tallest building at the site in 2020, when the package included an adjacent lot carrying roughly 105,000 square feet of unused development rights. Building those out would mean new DOB filings and, in all likelihood, a return trip through local review.
The institute’s board already includes Nobel laureate Jim Rothman and Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, host of the “Huberman Lab” podcast. A search for a first CEO is underway, and Ackman said he expects operations to begin in the main building by the end of this year.
As of publication, the leasing site for West End Labs is still live, still branded to Taconic and its partners, and still listing availability across every floor. Neither side has disclosed how much of the space is currently occupied or what happens to any existing leases.
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