Downtown's First K through 8th Grade School Gets Go Ahead by Etta Sanders It's official. A new kindergarten through 8th grade school will be built into a 75-story residential tower next to NYU Downtown Hospital on Beekman Street. The 600-seat school will open its doors in the fall of 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver made the announcement on Feb. 4. The school will occupy 100,000 square feet over five floors of the building to be built by developer Bruce Ratner and designed by architect Frank Gehry. Between 650 and 750 rental apartments and condominiums will occupy the rest of the building, except for one floor that will be part of the hospital. Construction will begin in about a year, Ratner said. It was welcome news for a community where school space is getting tighter as the residential population grows. According to the city's projections, Lower Manhattan's school-age population will increase by 3,400 students over the next five years. "Creating the school fulfills a promise we made to the residents of Lower Manhattan, especially those who have children," Bloomberg said. "It will support our goal of establishing Lower Manhattan as a family friendly neighborhood." In an agreement between City Councilman Alan Gerson and Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, the "primary cachement area" for the school will be the same as for P.S. 89 and P.S. 234. But there is no indication as to how it will be decided who will go to which of the neighborhood's three elementary schools. Zoning decisions are to be made by the Community Education Council, whose forerunner was the District 2 community school board. That board-following contentious public hearings- determined the zoning for P.S./I.S. 89 seven months before the schools opened in September 1998. This school will be the first combined elementary and middle school in Lower Manhattan, and the only middle school zoned for Downtown kids. The zoning is a sore spot for some parents at P.S. 89 who want I.S. 89 zoned as a neighborhood school. That request has been denied in part because the school is not large enough to guarantee a seat to every eligible student. While schools have been built into mixed-use buildings on city property, this will be the first time a public school will be part of a wholly private development. It is also the first Lower Manhattan school to be created entirely with public funds, Madelyn Wils, chairwoman of CB1 said at the press conference. "This is actually the first public school being built in our district in Lower Manhattan with school capital funds," she said, adding that other neighborhood schools were built with private funds, usually from developers. "We've done intriguing things to have public schools built in Lower Manhattan." The announcement came after weeks of negotiations between the city, Silver and the developer over the cost of the school. The city is committed to spending up to $60 million, $44 million of which is already allocated in the School Construction Authority budget. The balance, Bloomberg said, has been requested from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC). Earlier news reports had suggested that the city was delaying a commitment on the school in exchange for Silver's support of the Jet's stadium on the West Side. Silver said there was no link. "This is not about the stadium. Let's be very clear, this is about the future of downtown Manhattan," Silver said. When Silver was asked if Bloomberg's support for the school made him more inclined to reciprocate with support for the stadium, the mayor jumped in to answer. "Boy, I wish that were the case," he said. The new residential building will go up in what is now a parking lot that CB1 has long viewed as a promising location for a school. But as recently as last year, the Department of Education expressed reservations about the proximity of a school to the emergency traffic generated by both the hospital and a nearby firehouse. Bloomberg said affordable space in the neighborhood was hard to come by. "The problem we have is that there are not a lot of options down here. We'd prefer not to have a fire house close by where sirens go off or ambulances show up at a hospital, but we live in a big city and, no matter what, you're going to have noise." The school will have the distinction of being designed by an internationally renowned architect. "They are very few kids who will in their whole lives ever get a chance to get an education in a Frank Gehry designed building," Bloomberg said.