Condo Developer to Demolish Corlears School on W. 15th Street

A condominium developer plans to tear down a row of three townhouses that make up the Corlears School in the Chelsea neighborhood, according to new documents filed with the Department of Buildings.

The school, which is in the midst of a major downsizing, does not appear to have a new home lined up. However, it still apparently plans to run a nursery and a pre-K school, after one final year as a kindergarten-through-fifth grade school.

The demolition plans were first filed on Tuesday, May 12, after a deed confirming the sale of the school was made public on May 4. The Saffayeh Group, a Brooklyn-based developer, closed the deal on the school property at 324 W. 15th St.—between Eighth and Ninth Aves.—for $19 million.

After spending decades as a K-5 institution, Corlears will begin offering only pre-K and nursery services this fall, and did not comment on the demolition filings or announce next steps as of press time. It is currently accepting fall applications for the upcoming 2026-2027 school year.

According to the real estate blog Traded, the purchase agreement was “structured as an as-is deal with no financing contingencies and allows for flexible post-closing occupancy through 2026,” implying that it was ostensibly designed to give school officials time to shift their operations elsewhere.

The last available enrollment numbers, from the 2022-2023 school year, reveal that 95 students were attending Corlears at the time. This was down from 130 in the mid-2000s.

Families with older Corlears students impacted by the change to pre-K-only schooling have been encouraged to enroll them at the Calhoun School on the Upper West Side instead, Crain’s New York Business noted.

That school has been through some serious shifts of its own in the past few years, namely via the sale of one of its buildings on W. 74th Street to a developer, which originally planned to make it a luxury condo building as well.

This was quickly flipped to a new developer, who ended up leasing it to the city as a homeless shelter instead; the Calhoun School now operates a K-12th grade school from a building on W. 81st Street. Its former school, the homeless shelter, has since been a source of steady complaint for some area residents.

It now costs $47,000 for five days of pre-kindergarten at Corlears, which was founded in 1968 by Irene Neurath, and moved to its current location from the Lower East Side in 1970. It originally consisted of two conjoined townhouses, but school administrators bought a third at 322 W. 15th St. for $4.4 million back in 2008.

According to 2024 tax records, the last year publicly available, the school maintained roughly $10.7 million in assets compared to around $12.2 million in liabilities. It had maintained a roughly even amount of both, at around $11.9 million, in tax filing from just a year earlier.

The tax filings note that Head of School David Egolf made $304,009 in base compensation during the fiscal year ending in 2024, plus around $10,000 in additional compensation.

The school is only four-stories high, and encompasses roughly 19,800 square feet. Many Saffayeh projects are similarly low-rise, however, although they cater to luxury clients.

Saffayeh has also made waves elsewhere in Manhattan recently, namely by pursuing a separate luxury condominium project that demolished 130-year-old church at 213 E. 83rd St., the former St. Elizabeth of Hungry Church after purchasing it from the cash strapped Archdiocese of New York.

Groups such as Friends of the Upper East Side were unsuccessful in convincing the Landmarks Preservation Commission to grant protected status to the church in question, which was beloved for its longtime services to deaf parishioners. It closed due to declining attendance in 2014, and stood vacant in the intervening 12 years.

The demolition of the church began in late February, with Saffayeh slated to transform the plot—purchased for $11.8 million—into a building that contains eight or nine condos.