Local School Leaves Lower Manhattan; CUNY Branch to Take its Place
A Downtown institution of higher learning is leaving the community. At the Monday meeting of the board of the City’s Build NYC Resource Corporation (an arm of the City’s Economic Development Corporation that floats debt on behalf of non-profits seeking to acquire New York real estate), trustees voted to allow Metropolitan College of New York (MCNY) to sell its home at 60 West Street (also known as 40 Rector Street) for approximately $40 million.
Approval from Build NYC was needed because that agency “issued approximately $67 million in tax-exempt revenue bonds to finance the acquisition and renovation of the College’s Manhattan campus in 2014,” explained Anna Taktachev, a project manager for the Economic Development Corporation.
The facility will be sold to the City University of New York [CUNY], she said. The CUNY system plans to transfer its Hunter College Brookdale campus, now on East 25th Street, to 60 West Street. The new school, which will house CUNY’s Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing, is expected to be in operation by this January. MCNY will consolidate operations at its Bronx campus.
Ms. Taktachev said, “proceeds from the 40 Rector Street sale will redeem two-thirds of the outstanding bonds,” on which the remaining balance is approximately $60 million. “Of that, $20 million will be restructured, cutting annual debt service from $4.9 million to $1.8 million.”
MCNY projects that savings from these actions, combined with improved operations, will enhance its financial condition, with a projected surplus of more than $4 million in 2026. The school says student enrollment is growing steadily, despite the institution shrinking its footprint, with a 12 percent year-on-year increase in 2025. In 2024, according to Ms. Taktachev, only 17 percent of MCNY students attended classes in person at the West Street campus, but annual occupancy costs were approximately $2.2 million, “a significant expense for an underutilized space.”
In the early 2010s, MCNY joined a group of other public-service organizations that planted their flags at 40 Rector Street (as 60 West Street is also known). Its neighbors in the building would eventually include the China Institute, Big Brothers Big Sisters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Urban Justine Center. They were all steered to the Financial District building by a provision in the tax code that allows nonprofit organizations to avoid paying real estate tax on office space they have purchased, but would be indirectly liable for in rented space. (The building at 40 Rector, where MCNY bought the sixth, seventh, and eighth floors, as well the ground-floor entrance space, facing West Street, is a commercial condominium, where offices are owned by their occupants, rather than rented.)
Originally called the Barrett Building (for the pioneering chemical company that was a leading manufacturer of roofing tar in the late 1800s, and was later absorbed into the Allied Chemical conglomerate), 40 Rector was designed by the partnership of Warren and Wetmore, seven years after the 1913 opening of that firm’s signature piece, Grand Central Terminal. Warren and Wetmore was also famous in the Jazz Age for iconic Manhattan structures such as the Crown Building, the New York Yacht Club, and Steinway Hall.
The 17-story Renaissance Revival structure faced the Hudson River waterfront when it opened, but the subsequent development of Battery Park City, which is built on landfill (partially comprised of spoil excavated from the World Trade Center foundations) extended the shoreline by several hundred feet, starting in the late 1960s. In the 1970s and beyond, 40 Rector Street ceased to be a premium address and the building fell on hard times, becoming back office space for City agencies. It was further eclipsed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, after the (now demolished) Rector Street Pedestrian Bridge was built directly in front of it.