Another church may soon meet a wrecking ball.
The former St. Columba campus on West 25th Street in Chelsea, which the Catholic Archdiocese of New York has marketed as a development site for months, is under contract to sell to Timber Equities, a firm known for its large luxury rental projects, court filings show.
Timber, which to this point has focused on multifamily developments in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan, inked a deal Dec. 16 to buy the four-building parcel between Eighth and Ninth avenues for $48.3 million, according to a copy of the contract filed in Manhattan state Supreme Court Thursday.
The court is involved because any sale of real estate by a nonprofit like a church requires legal approval.
Timber, which has put down a $2.4 million deposit, would close on an all-cash deal within 90 days of securing an official green-light, according to the filings.
It is not clear what exactly Timber is planning to do with the site, which is ringed by the sprawling Penn South housing complex. An email sent to Mitch Perle, the Timber partner listed as the firm’s contact in the purchase and sale agreement, was not returned by press time.
But the site, a 200-foot-wide sweep addressed as Nos. 328-343 W. 25th St. that includes a church built in 1845 as well as a school, convent and rectory, could support a 128,000-square-foot development under its current zoning, according to the brochure prepared for the property this summer by listing agency JLL.
In a way, the church’s demise is not totally unexpected. Its school, a terracotta-detailed edifice that dates back to 1909, held its last classes in 2006, when existing St. Columba students transferred to the Catholic school offered by the Guardian Angel church at nearby 193 10th Ave. That school also later shut down in 2023.
And the church itself suffered major damage when a wall in the altar area collapsed during the summer of 2022, forcing its parishioners — estimated to number about 200 before the pandemic — to attend mass at the nearby Guardian Angel church. The two parishes had been under the same management since 2015, when the diocese merged them after dwindling attendance.
The combined parish suffered an operating loss of $154,000 in fiscal year 2023 and $261,000 in fiscal year 2024, according to an accounting statement submitted to the court.
The Archdiocese has been unloading real estate across the city in recent years, including its longtime headquarters at 1011 First Ave. in Midtown for a reported $100 million residential conversion deal that church officials said was necessary to help settle a long list of sexual abuse cases.
Other church-owned sites recently shopped to developers include St. Elizabeth on the Upper East Side, where a nine-unit building is planned, St. Emeric in the East Village and St. Paul/Holy Rosary in Harlem, though church officials may have had a change of heart about St. Paul.
In the case of St. Columba, the reason for the divestment is officially to help with general expenses and “the conduct and furtherance of its corporate purposes,” the Archdiocese’s petition to the court says.
An upstart firm whose principals include former Extell executive Jeff Torkin, Timber’s existing and underway projects include a 55-unit offering at 2395 Palisade Ave. in Riverdale called The Henry, a 115-unit development at 170 W. 225th St. in Marble Hill and a 60-unit project at 5055 Broadway in Inwood. The St. Columba project would appear to be its first in lower Manhattan.
Founded in 1845 by Irish laborers from the West Side docks, who built the church’s building on West 25th Street that same year, St. Columba, named for the protector of poets, managed to survive a multi-block urban-renewal “slum clearance” effort in the early 1960s to make way for Penn South, a 10-building, 2,800-unit limited-equity co-op. St. Columba, which is not a landmark, might not enjoy the same protection this time around.
Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese, said he could not comment on a deal that has not yet been finalized.
