SCHOOLS GOONA $PENDER
Binging on art, food, gyms to lure rich kids
At the end of February, Friends Seminary, a $63,200-a-year private Quaker school on East 16th Street, unveiled a $3.9 million art installation on its roof.
The Skyspace by James Turrell is a jewel box room where light from windows and artificial sources mix together to stunning effect.
Insiders say the art installation, which is open to the public on select Fridays, is the latest shot fired as New York City private schools compete to offer increasingly lavish amenities.
“There is absolutely an arms race,” an educational consultant told The Post. “You have parents paying over $60,000 to send their kids to private schools. That’s a big ask. And they generally want the best bang for the buck.”
Turrell’s work is in top museums around the world and is beloved by celebrities. Kendall Jenner has a $750,000 Turrell sculpture in her Beverly Hills home, while Kanye West and Zynga mobile games founder Mark Pincus have donated millions to fund the artist’s life’s work — Roden Crater — a massive piece, 40 years in the making, carved out of an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert.
Friends Seminary’s president, Robert Lauder, fund-raised the remaining millions and thinks the Skyspace has the potential to draw in families who might not have otherwise considered the school.
“[It shows them that] this school values creativity — at a time when some schools are cutting back on those kinds of programs,” he told The New York Times.
The educational consultant said that some amenities at the city’s toniest K-through-12 institutions are more about bragging rights than artistic expression.
Lunches by celeb chefs
He noted that, in 2017, Riverdale Country School, where tuition is $54,545, unveiled a six-lane swimming pool that’s a work of art unto itself. Designed by PBDW Architects, who also did Equinox’s swank Greenwich Village flagship and worked on the restoration of John Jacob Astor IV’s Rhinebeck estate, it is built into a cliff with glass walls that afford picturesque views.
Meanwhile, the Upper West Side’s Calhoun School (annual tuition $63,500) is famous for its gourmet lunches, courtesy of a team of chefs that has included alums of the French Culinary Institute, ABC Cocina and Momofuku.
“They have the most amazing food on Earth,” gushed the consultant, a fact not lost on the competition. “It’s been a model for a lot of lunch [programs].”
On the Upper East Side, the Nightingale-Bamford School (annual tuition $61,655) unveiled a state-of-the-art, professional-level black box theater seven years ago, courtesy of the Lauder cosmetics family.
Nearby, the Dalton School (tuition $61,120) opened its Engineering and Design Center in 2019 with high-tech fabrication tools, including a 3D printer, to serve the school’s six robotics teams.
Sportier types might prefer Grace Church School ($62,270 per year) on the edge of the East Village. There, a $15-million gymnasium, done in the late 2010s, features a batting cage and a golf simulator.
The Chapin School (tuition $62,500) also did a huge gym renovation in 2021. Amenities include a rooftop playing field, a doubleheight gym with a running track and a treatment room with giant whirlpool tubs and ultrasound and electrical stimulation machines — and two full-time trainers.