Children's Aid Buying $45M HQ Building in Harlem
The new location brings more than 200 staff members under one roof at 114 W. 125th St.
NEW YORK CITY—Children’s Aid plans to move its headquarters from Midtown to a new office now currently under construction at 124th Street and Lenox Avenue. The entrance as shown in the photograph is at 114 W. 125th St.
A Children’s Aid representative tells GlobeSt.com that it is in contract for the Harlem office building for $45.25 million with the owner, the Rockfeld Group doing business as SAAB Management Company.
The new headquarters of the non-profit dedicated to helping children in poverty will occupy 55,565 square feet spanning four floors. They plan to move into the 125th St. facility by summer 2020. The relocation will bring more than 200 staff members including program leadership and central administration under one roof. The new location will improve staff access to the organization’s more than 40 sites across the city including 11 in Harlem.
The headquarters will be near several public transportation hubs as well as the Children’s Aid Dunlevy Milbank Community Center, its family stabilization services and several early childhood education facilities. The building is a build to suit commercial condominium, saving on office occupancy and energy costs. It also contains ground-floor retail.
Children Aid’s president and CEO Phoebe Boyer says, “It ensures that we can lock in our office space costs over the long term, which is all the more critical today as we confront the challenges all nonprofits face of delivering critical services with increasingly uncertain funding sources.”
For more than 100 years, the Children’s Aid headquarters were located in the United Charities Building at 105 East 22nd St. Children’s Aid and its fellow tenants Community Service Society and the New York City Mission Society sold the property in 2015 for $128 million. Of this amount, CSS received $63.5 million, the Mission Society received $31.9 million, and $31.8 million went to Children’s Aid.
Since then, Children’s Aid temporarily split up its administrative functions into three locations: its current headquarters at 711 Third Ave., 150 E. 45th St. and 4 W. 125th St. The goal was to consolidate these three offices into the Harlem headquarters.
Transwestern’s Stephen Powers, Lindsay Ornstein, Ryan McKinney and Mac Means represented Children’s Aid in the purchase of the new headquarters. The building owner, Rockfeld, was represented in-house.