Touro College may take nearly 300K sf at Chetrit’s 500 Seventh

Jewish-sponsored school signs for 57K sf, in talks for massive expansion

From left: Joseph Chetrit, 500 Seventh Avenue in Garment District and Touro's Alan Kadish
From left: Joseph Chetrit, 500 Seventh Avenue in Garment District and Touro's Alan Kadish

Touro College has signed a lease for a two-floor, 57,000-square-foot space at the Chetrit Group’s 17-story Garment District office building at 500 Seventh Avenue, and is in advanced talks for an extra 230,000 square feet, The Real Deal has learned.

The Jewish-sponsored private school has a memorandum of understanding for the additional space, Alan Schoor, senior vice president at Touro, confirmed to TRD. If a lease deal is arranged for the full 287,000 square feet, Touro will occupy nearly half of the 606,000-square-foot Class B office property.

“Negotiations are ongoing and proceeding in a positive fashion,” Schoor said in a statement.

Sources close to the deal said that it isn’t yet clear how many floors Touro will occupy in total.

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Michael Dreizen and Matthew Feigen of Newmark Grubb Knight Frank represented the Chetrit Group, which owns a majority stake in the building. Joseph Moinian’s the Moinian Group owns a minority stake there. Solil Management, the company that manages the assets of late real estate mogul Sol Goldman, owns the ground lease, as TRD reported.

A FedEx Office outpost occupies the ground-floor retail space.

Dreizen and Feigen declined to comment. Representatives for Chetrit couldn’t immediately be reached.

Touro, which was founded in 1971, has roughly 20,000 students and locations all over the city, including at 27-33 West 23rd Street, 43 West 23rd Street, 227 West 60th Street, 65 Broadway and 2090 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.