Elite British School Will Relocate to Gramercy Park from East Village in September

An elite British grammar school that has been based in the East Village for more than a decade will be opening its doors in the Gramercy Park neighborhood in September.

Nord Anglia International School New York (NAISNY), which has been based in the East Village since 2013, will relocate to 111 E. 22nd St. in the Gramercy Park area.

“We will miss the East Village, but we are looking forward to welcome students in the new building in Gramercy,” said Jimmy Frawley, principal of NAISNY, which is part of a global network following the British education model with 88 locations globally in 33 countries. “Relocating to Gramercy allows us to bring our legacy of educational excellence to this vibrant, historic neighborhood,” he said.

Gramercy is something of an educational hub for both private and public schools in Manhattan. Although the locale lost the original Stuyvesant High School, the elite public school that moved downtown in the early 1990s, it still has the Salk School of Science, a public middle school at 320 E. 20th St. The École, an independent French-American bilingual school, currently occupies the site where NAISNY is moving, but the French school won’t be going far. It will move right next door into bigger quarters. And not too far down the road on East 22nd Street sits the lower-school campus of the Epiphany School, a regional Catholic school and past winner of a Department of Education Blue Ribbon award. And at 222 E. 16th St. stands the campus of the Friends Seminary, a K-8 school that is the oldest continuously operating co-ed school in the city.

The New York branch of NAIS currently serves about 150 students drawn for diverse locations across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, and New Jersey. The student body collectively represents 35 nationalities, Frawley said. The top tuition rate is $55,300, plus a $2,500 new-student fee and a $2,500 lunch fee.

The school takes in kids as young as 2 and has grades K-8. It prides itself on its strong sense of community, with active parent involvement through performances, workshops, and social events, reflecting strong performance in academics, teaching, and diversity with a low student-teacher ratio of 6 to 1.

That has allowed NAISNY to earn an A-plus rating on Niche, a database of schools and colleges across the United States.

While the curriculum maintains a global focus, certain subjects, such as US history, remain US-specific, Frawley said, and he says the balance of global perspectives and localized content prepares students for higher education.

In addition to its academic offerings, NAISNY provides a range of extracurricular activities, with students participating with other schools in CONSAT, the Confederation of New York Schools and Team Sports, in volleyball, basketball, and soccer.

The building at 111 E. 22nd St. was constructed in 1914 by the noted architect R.H. Robertson with the firm Rowe & Baker. Robertson designed everything from the private residences of Jacqueline Kennedy’s childhood home at Hammersmith Farm to public buildings such as the Great Camp Santanoni in the Adirondacks and civic buildings including the Pequot Library in Southport, Conn., designed for for the Marquand family, as well as some of the earliest steel skyscrapers in NYC.

The building that will house the NAIS New York school, while not quite as glamorous as Robertson’s other projects, has its own storied past stretching back 121 years. It originally served as an annex to the United Charities Building nearby. Over the years, the property has undergone various changes, including a four-story extension added a year after it opened. In 1946, it became the headquarters for the Dockworkers Union, which held the building until 1980, when it was sold and converted into commercial space.

The building later housed the Elite Modeling Agency for a decade until 2005, before being acquired by the Trump Group, a company owned by Eddie and Jules Trump, local real estate owners unrelated to President Donald Trump or his companies, who flipped it two years later to its current owner, Shnem Hasar.

Terms of the lease signed by NAISNY were not disclosed, but Frawley said the school has signed a 25-year agreement, so it appears the school is ready to be a long-term neighbor.