No Riverside Mirage

Neighborhood to get its first new school building in a decade

By Megan Finnegan Bungeroth

Representatives from the School Construction Authority (SCA) revealed plans last week for a brand-new school building planned for the Upper West Side, the first new structure built specifically as a school in several decades in the neighborhood.

The Riverside School, P.S./I.S. 342, will be constructed as part of the deal that the city made with Extell Development Company to build the Riverside Center on what had been the last undeveloped parcel of land on the Upper West Side. The lot extends from West 59th Street to West 61st Street, from West End Avenue to the West Side Highway, and will be home to 2,500 apartments, with a small number designated as affordable housing. (Extell agreed to build 500 affordable housing units as part of the deal, but some may be off-site in other locations.)

The five-tower complex will also house retail space, a hotel and the new school that the community demanded in order to accommodate the influx of families the development will be sure to bring.

Mike Marisola and Elan Abneri of the SCA, which is charged with building the internal architecture of the school, presented the plans to Community Board 7’s Youth Education & Libraries committee last Thursday. Extell originally balked at building the school, citing the high cost as prohibitive to their entire Riverside Center plan, but eventually agreed to build the “core and shell”—the walls, ceilings, electrical and HVAC systems—of a 100,000-square-foot school building, though the community had pushed for 150,000 square feet.

The SCA will finish 85,000 square feet, and showed the committee plans for the building that will serve 488 students from pre-K through 8th grade. While Marisola and Abneri stressed that the Department of Education would have final say over how each of the rooms were used, they noted that they had worked with Dattner Architects, who are designing the interior, to create space for a full medical suite, a parent community room, speech and reading rooms and a special education room, in addition to classrooms, specialty science suites, a cafeteria, a library and a gym.

“We’re very restricted in the space we were given,” said Abneri. The SCA hopes to receive funding to utilize the additional 15,000 square feet, but is for now working within the 85,000 square feet it can count on.

“There is a line item in the capital plan that shows something along the lines of $24 million for the school,” said Mark Diller, chair of Community Board 7, explaining where the funding would come from and why the SCA was limited in the space they could build.

Abneri explained that since the school is not slated to be complete and open until the 2015 school year, the City Council is being cautious in allocating funds too far in advance for the project. “If they put the money in this plan but they can’t use it, they have to put it somewhere else, fixing a roof somewhere,” said Abneri.

The board and the community had hoped for a larger school, but the committee decided against any resolutions or official statements about the plans, opting to wait and see if the additional space could be utilized and how the Department of Education plans to use the 20-plus classrooms that the SCA plans to construct.