Google Maps
The drawn-out question of who would take over one of the Upper West Side’s most coveted institutional properties finally has an answer — and the price tag climbed well past where the contest began before a winner emerged.
Advertisement
When we last checked in on 150 West 85th Street (between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues), a single school had set a floor price for the six-story building and was waiting to see whether anyone would challenge it. Someone did. The bidding went to auction, and by the time advisers selling the building named a victor, the winning offer had jumped more than $13 million above that opening number, Bloomberg reports.The buyer is The Geneva School of Manhattan, the classical Christian institution five blocks north at 138 West 90th Street that set the floor at $20 million in May. Its winning bid: $33.2 million. The deal still needs sign-off from a New York bankruptcy judge before it’s official, but Geneva has been picked as the winning bidder.
The school enrolls 425 students from preschool through twelfth grade and teaches, in its own words, within a biblical framework. It has grown enrollment about 43 percent since 2020 — a notable climb given the shrinking school-age population across the city.
The deal would close the book on a property that has spent more than a year in financial purgatory. Manhattan Country School, the progressive institution founded during the civil rights era around social-justice teaching, sliding-scale tuition, and a working Catskills farm, drained its endowment and took on tax-exempt debt to buy the building for $28 million in 2015, betting on higher enrollment and tuition. The pandemic gutted those plans. Wealthier families left, costs outran revenue, and the school slid into bankruptcy. It closed in May 2025, as we documented during the school’s collapse.
Proceeds from the sale are set to repay the school’s creditors, chief among them lender Flushing Bank, which is owed roughly $28 million. The schoolhouse dates to 1928 and once housed The New School before MCS acquired it; it was appraised at $38 million in 2021.
Have a news tip? Send it to us here!
