Chabad’s Home: New Condo Tower

Douglas Feiden reports in the Westside Spirit:

A prime 60-foot-wide site less than 300 feet away from Central Park on the Upper West Side is being developed as the future home of Chabad of the West Side, Straus News has learned.

The Jewish center, which became the first Chabad House in Manhattan when it opened in 1984, will occupy five floors and some 20,000 square feet at a now-vacant lot at 15 West 96th Street.

In a complicated real estate deal, the box-shaped religious institution will become the base of a planned 16-unit luxury condominium tower that will soar above it, offering residents sweeping park views.

The siting of the Chabad, with its own entrance and elevator, in the lower five floors of the 22-story building, allows the developer to claim a “community facility bonus” and erect, with city approval, a 312-foot structure, taller than zoning would otherwise permit, documents show.

Two synagogues will be housed in the facility, the larger of which will occupy 2,000 square feet and sport a double-height, 20-foot ceiling, the two Chabad rabbis overseeing the project said in a joint interview.

There will be a children’s library and 11 classrooms spread out on three floors, with 3,500 square feet per floor, for dual use as both a preschool and a Hebrew school, the rabbis said.

Plans also call for conference space, a 2,000-square-foot, second-floor terrace doubling as a playground, a training academy for early-childhood teachers, and a men’s mikvah, or ritual bath.

The preschool alone will serve 150 children — as young as 18 months, as old as five years — with one head teacher and two assistants instructing as few as eight toddlers per classroom.

“We are laser-focused on preschool,” said Rabbi Shlomo Kugel, director of the Chabad, which he co-founded with his wife Rivka and which has offered an early Jewish education from rented space at 166 West 97th Street since 2001.

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