Class warfare
Wealthy Upper East Side prep schools are driving neighbors crazy with construction — and using tax breaks to perform the work.
Yorkville residents who live near the tony Chapin and Brearley schools, which sit a block away from each other on East End Avenue, say the projects are wreaking havoc on their once-peaceful corridor.
“Traffic is horrible, construction is horrible, the Callaheads [portable toilets] stink, it’s dirty,” said Peggy Levine. “East End Avenue used to be lovely, now everything is horrible.”
The middle-class residents of an 84th Street building that abuts The Chapin School and where units go for about $400,000 complain that the city is sacrificing millions of dollars in tax revenue — and their quality-of-life — on a project that benefits the offspring of only the richest New Yorkers. The school’s alumnae include Ivanka Trump, Vera Wang and Jackie Onassis.
“It’s a privileged entity that offers nothing to the community,” said Lisa Paule, who has lived behind Chapin on 84th for nearly a decade and cofounded a group, Serene Green 84, to protest the project. “The city needs to be responsible to residents, not to developers.”
Chapin also racked up the highest number of noise complaints of any city construction site from January 2014 to June 2016, according to state Comp- troller Thomas DiNapoli.
Residents say the noise level has gone down since the school finished digging out a basement cafeteria, but the project is still loud.
Now they’re worried about the dangers posed by a crane that’s scheduled to go up in the coming weeks as the school adds three floors and a gym.
Chapin, which has called Yorkville home since 1928, said it has been in constant communication with neighbors about the project.
“We are honored to be here,” it said in a statement.
A block north of Chapin, at East 83rd Street and East End Avenue, The Brearley School, whose alumnae include Kyra Sedgwick and Caroline Kennedy, is building a second campus.
Neighbors say noise hasn’t been a problem, but they worry the project will push out small businesses.
Next door to the Brearley site, the sign for East End Wine Exchange is practically invisible behind the scaffolds, and it’s hurting business, said an employee, Indra, who declined to give her last name.
At The NightingaleBamford School, which inspired TV’s “Gossip Girl,” construction ended about a year ago, but it had been a big nuisance, landing at No. 29 on the noisiest-projects list, with 52 total complaints, 36 for afterhours construction.
The city will give up an estimated $785,000 in tax revenue for the project, according to NightingaleBamford’s application for the Build NYC program.
Build NYC offers nonprofits help with construction projects by offering investors who loan money to the projects tax breaks on the interest they earn.
The Chapin project got about $1.9 million in tax breaks, while Brearley received about $1.2 million. All three schools charge tuitions north of $45,000.
John Kaehny, director of the watchdog group Reinvent Albany, called the tax breaks another example of the city subsidizing wealthy institutions.
“I don’t disagree that it seems odd the public is helping subsidize wealthy private schools,” he said.
Build NYC says the city will ultimately gain more from the projects than it will lose in tax money.