By Gus Saltonstall
A new 28-story building is slated for the corner of an Upper West Side block following the future demolition of a four-story property that is currently there, new permits filed this week with the city show.
Rockefeller Group and Atlas Capital Group filed demolition plans for 200 West 97th Street, on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue, on September 9, the New York City Department of Buildings’ portal shows. The four-story building is still standing, but it is encased in scaffolding and netting.
Along with the demolition permit, the ownership group of the property has also filed a new building permit for a 28-story, 340-unit building at the address, the DOB portal shows. The new building is slated to be more than 390,000 square feet and include 2,500 square feet of retail space on the ground floor.
The new building will also have a pet spa, podcast room, screening room, and kids room, according to Commercial Observer, which was the first publication to report on the possible new building.
A DOB spokesperson confirmed to West Side Rag that the job filing for the full demolition of the four-story building currently at 200 West 97th Street has been approved, but the contractor has not filed yet for the permit to actually begin the work. The permit for construction of the new building at the address is still under review, the spokesperson added.
As a reminder, the Roman Catholic Church of Holy Name of Jesus and Saint Gregory sold 200 West 97th Street to Rockefeller Group and Atlas Capital Group for $96 million in February 2026. The church will continue to operate from its building on the same block at 207 West 96th Street.
The deal fell under an incentive program that gives tax abatements to developers who agree to set aside a certain percentage of the housing for lower-income residents; in this case, the new 28-story building will be 25 percent affordable. The other units will be market-rate.
The Rag will keep an eye out for when the current four-story building at 200 West 97th Street is demolished.
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What is the current building there? Housing, church space?
It was the school, thrift store and community space.
use to be catholic school.
340 new apartments, with 85 affordable YIMBY!
I think it says 25% affordable. Whatever affordable means.
Do the math. 25% of 340 units is 85. Certainly better than nothing.
Its a certain percentage of the area’s median income
That building used to house DeLaSalle Academy, no?
340-units? That’s more like it!
Many such low rise buildings across the city can be replaced with more housing, that’s the only way to bring rents down over the long term.
No thanks. I like my sunlight. Wall to wall tall buildings will make the neighborhood miserable. There are many better ways to create new housing than just going taller.
What might those better ways be?
There’s a need for new housing, but rents are not coming down on the UWS. You’d need a glut of empty apartments with no takers for that to be a possibility, and even then, general inflationary trends make me doubt that rents would really come down. There’s a glut of empty commercial storefronts on the UWS, yet are landlords lowering their asking prices? One still reads of longtime businesses closing due to extreme rent increases, even during this time of plentiful empty commercial space. When groceries return to their pre-pandemic prices then I’ll believe that rents will also deflate. Is that too pessimistic?…
The YIMBYs want to “relax the zoning” in the outer boroughs and the suburbs thinking it would solve the problem. It absolutely will not. To get to the point that there is a glut of apartments, where people actually truly want to be in an apartment, you would have to use eminent domain and involve an agency like Empire State Development, there’s no other way.
Another key issue here is, you can build all the housing you want near an LIRR, Metro-North or NJ Transit station, but at the end of the day an apartment in Yonkers, West Orange or Rockville Centre is not the UWS. You can build all the apartments you want in Queens Village, but Queens Village isn’t the UWS. Until the day enough guys can get a girlfriend who lives on the UWS or a neighborhood like it and who is willing to travel to Bayside or Sheepshead Bay to see their boyfriend or their family, you’re always going to have pressure in an area like the UWS. That pressure will eventually come for historic district landmarking on the UWS.
Yes we need to build much more on the UWS and not just in outer boroughs. Much of the historic preservation isn’t actually about historic preservation, it’s about reducing competition and increasing property prices for homeowners and real estate investors.
If we got rid of historic district landmarking, real estate investors would make a killing on the UWS.
Eminent domain would be the only way to have enough housing supply on the UWS for those who want to live on the UWS and even then it is not guaranteed and causes other problems.
I agree with you, it’s been many decades of under building and growing demand to live in NYC for access to our incredible economic and cultural opportunities that we are pretty far behind the number of units needed.
Now with rising rates and construction costs, the best we can hope for is housing to come down in inflation adjusted terms, but even just slowing rent growth vs the current trend would be a win.
But it all’s strips neighborhoods of their character. Like the exquisite apartments t buildings in Washington Heights or on the Grand Concourse. And sunlight for residents in shorter buildings and on the street -thst is a problem. Maybe it is worth it, but I don’t think it should be ignored.
Holy Smokes
Hopefully by the time this building is complete the surrounding area on Broadway won’t have as many empty store fronts. From the 70s to 110th street there’s pretty much an empty store on every block.
Broadway and Amsterdam in the 90’s, 100’s, 110’s desperately need some life.
340 new households should help liven things up!
The 80’s too. It’s like a desert here on Broadway – empty places for rent.
The church is 207 West 96th, not 97th.
That’s a beautiful building that they’re tearing down I hope they salvage the stone.
Awesome news! The more housing, the better.
To understand what is so wrong with real estate development in this city, you don’t need to look much farther than this deal. A chuch disposes of property no longer needed for its religious purposes (and on which property taxes were never paid) for a tax-free $96 million gain. The developers receive opaque, but surely massive, tax abatements in exchange for making 25% of the apartments in their new building “affordable” (whatever that means). Millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies – largely hidden from view and contributed via tax exemptions and abatements, but subsidies nonetheless – all delivered out-of sight, out-of mind.
You’re 100% correct.
NYC loses around $2B a year in tax revenue by providing 421-A tax abatements to wealthy developers to provide a few thousand so-called affordable apartments to a handful of lucky recipients.
This is money the city could desperately use for our schools, keeping the streets clean, etc.
All this “affordable” housing is very expensive.
What else is new? Why have religious organizations been tax-exempt forever, while handling vast amounts of wealth in coin and prime real estate? Because someone says they “believe”?!
I believe in Santa Claus, but my W-2 doesn’t seem to reflect any of that.
Fix the original scam. The rest can follow.
More like in plain sight
It used to be that you’d find a movie theater within a block or two of every subway stop. Now it’s tall glass boxes. The world grows and changes, whether we want to or not.
They’re building a movie theater two blocks away from this location. The Uptown Theater. Just saying.
Oof! I’m all for creating more housing, but as someone who lived next door to a one story gym that got demolished to make way for a five story luxury building (“The Charlotte “) I feel so bad for the adjacent neighbors… your quality of life goes way down with no compensation during the demolition and construction, and the only bitter bright spot is at least the developers are financially motivated to do it as fast as they can… I think it still took about 3 years and I had scaffolding and netting and workers walking past my window the whole time, and noise on Saturdays. I feel like developers should have to compensate neighbors for hardship
Wherever she is, Jane Jacobs is spinning right now.
This is a great use of the space.
Intellectually I know that up is about the only option, but if my rough counting is correct, 28 stories will make it the tallest building in this area of the UWS. 726 Amsterdam (the building with Key Foods and Plant Shed) is 26 or 27 I believe. This new building will have a smaller footprint since it’ll still share the block with the church, but will still be quite the spike. I hope the builders at least try and make it blend in a bit at the lower levels vs succumbing to the typical steel and glass of midtown.
There are two 40 story buildings on W122nd, Vandewater and Clairemont.
This info has been out there for a number of years when the Franciscans sold the buildings
For all our local electeds and self-appointed community leaders yelling for years for more $$$ to expand school seats they and the city passed on a building bulit as a school. This is the second time this has happened in the area. Not too long ago a school on WEA and 87th (may be off by block on so) was also offered to the city
Before you say the developer offered more $$$, im sure something could have been worked out such as a zoning variance or tax abatement etc
A Montessori school was built on 85th bt WEA & Riverside. It has expanded because another school closed which was on WEA & 81st. Now, my windows face a small courtyard and I hear a lot of unsupervised screaming from children playing for hours in the open playground so close by in the courtyard. Goodbye hearing the birds, having some quiet and peace. This is a residential street. I love children but have called a few times to see if any supervision is there to lower the volume a little when possible- just a bit here and there. I can see the area and usually do not see any supervision.
How many more dogs will we have in this “under-dogged” hood?
I hope more and more. They always make life feel better.
Dogs, not children? Let’s have both.
I find your obsession with dogs in every comment no matter what the topic a little scary. And I don’t even have a dog.
I grew up at 226 W 97 next door to the property which was the Holy Name School and Parish House. At the noon time the street was used for recess or recreation for the kids who were mostly white Irish many of whom came from the low rises east of Amsterdam that were torn down to make way for Park West Village.
I would also be very interested to know what THEY mean by affordable; in this case we all know affordable is a giant euphemism for all sorts of rentals that many folks cannot afford . This neighborhood is already becoming so gentrified that I hardly recognize it from the neighborhood I moved into 40 years ago
I am a senior citizen who lives and depends on a Social Security check. I became disabled at a young age, so please don’t tell me I should have “prepared” for my older age by “saving up or having a pension”. Those options were never available to me.
What I wonder is if this “affordable” housing will include people like me who depending on income from Social Security?
Sigh! Probably not! It never does. Thank you for reading my comment.
You seem appreciative of the Social Security checks you are getting