Upper East Side Church To Be Replaced With Medical School Tower

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — An Upper East Side church building will soon be replaced with a medical school residence hall, two years after the house of worship was sold, city records show.

Weill Cornell Medicine plans to build a 17-story tower on the corner of York Avenue and East 74th Street: the current site of Church of the Epiphany, an Episcopal church built in 1939. The medical school, headquartered a few blocks south, filed plans on Thursday to begin construction.

Demolition of the church will start in June 2022, a Weill Cornell spokesperson told Patch on Friday. Work on the new building will start the following January, running until 2025.

Church of the Epiphany, meanwhile, is sticking around: the congregation is planning a move to the former Jan Hus Presbyterian Church one block west on 74th Street, which it purchased in 2018. It expects to move in next year, according to Epiphany's website, once the ornate brick structure has been renovated.

Weill Cornell purchased the church building for $68 million in 2019, as part of a deal that both sides described as a win-win. Its leader at the time, Rev. Jennifer Reddall, said the existing building was cramped and inaccessible for people with disabilities.

"Now, we’ll be able to significantly expand our ministry to the neighborhood, and at the same time, we’ll get to save a historic building," Reddall told Our Town in 2018, referring to the 130-year-old Jan Hus church.

City Councilmember Ben Kallos said at the time that he would watch the project closely to ensure that East Siders did not miss out on church services. Some preservationists, meanwhile, expressed reservations about the medical center's march deeper into residential Yorkville.

Weill Cornell spokesperson Jennifer Gundersen described the new building as a "vibrant new residence hall. At 173,000 square feet, it will double the school's residential living space.

Costing $264 million, the project was facilitated in part by a $55 million donation from the developer Jeffrey Feil.

The red-brick Epiphany building was designed by the architectural firm Wyeth and King, known for its large tower and simplified Norman Gothic style. Rumors have swirled for years about the site being redeveloped — as far back as 2005, City Realty reported that the church would be demolished to make way for a residential tower, but those plans never came to fruition.

City records show the new tower will stand 202 feet tall and will be designed by Perkins and Will, whose other projects include Memorial Sloan Kettering's laboratory medicine building on East 64th Street. The lower floors will include offices and a fitness center.

"Providing students of our medical and graduate schools with convenient housing close to the main campus is a top priority," Gundersen said.

Weill Cornell's tower continues the medical construction boom on the Upper East Side. The Hospital for Special Surgery is planning separate expansions on First Avenue and over the FDR Drive, Lenox Hill Hospital is plotting a 475-bed building on Park Avenue, and the New York Blood Center is trying to push through its contentious rezoning on East 67th Street.

Have an Upper East Side news tip? Email reporter Nick Garber at nick.garber@patch.com.