The rapidly expanding Touro University has just gotten bigger.
The private nonprofit institution, which held its first classes in 1971 in a donated ex-Ivy League club and now has a nearly $300 million real estate portfolio, has purchased 153 E. 124th St. in Harlem.
The property, which is home to the nonprofit New York College of Podiatric Medicine, whose tall painted sign is a familiar sight from the nearby Metro-North station, traded for $42 million, according to a deed that appeared in the city register Thursday.
With the purchase of the 5-story, 56,000-square-foot site, which was built in 1927 for the podiatric school, Touro also absorbs the school’s 350-person student body, effective immediately, a Touro spokeswoman said.
The acquisition comes on the heels of other recent property plays for Touro, a nonsectarian university that had been founded with a focus on Jewish heritage; it’s named in part for Judah Touro, a Jewish New Orleans-based merchant injured by a cannonball in the War of 1812.
In 2022, the same year that Touro shed its “college” moniker as it increased in graduate-level academic offerings, it leased seven floors encompassing 250,000 square feet at the office tower 3 Times Square to create its health care-focused Cross Rivers campus. It added an additional nearly 100,000 square feet at the high-rise, which is co-owned by Rudin Management and longtime occupant Thomson Reuters, in 2023.
Touro, whose president since 2010 has been Dr. Alan Kadish, has also made big regional moves recently. In 2022 it developed a new academic building on its existing campus in Central Islip, on Long Island, that offers classrooms for law, education and medical graduate students.
In addition to classrooms, No. 153, which sits between Park and Madison avenues, also offers a foot clinic that serves 25,000 patients a year, according to its website. Touro will continue to operate the clinic after renovating it, the university spokeswoman, Ellie Schlam, said.
Touro, which began life teaching 50 students at 30 W. 44th St., the former Yale Club and current Penn Club, today has a $37 million endowment, according to its Form 990 tax return for 2023, the most recent year publicly available. That year Touro valued its total real estate holdings at $289 million before accounting for depreciation, said the form, which added that the university also owned about $17 million worth of land.
No. 153 has a current market value, in the eyes of city appraisers, of $6.5 million, though as a nonprofit its assessment is zero, tax records show. Properties owned by schools and similar groups often pay nothing in the way of property taxes, a situation that critics have taken aim at in recent years at a time of major growth for many colleges.
Touro, whose enrollment is 19,000, offers classes at 35 sites, including in seven states and two countries. One of its main locations is close by in Harlem at 230 W. 125th St., a 148,000-square-foot block-through former department store that the school has leased since 2007.
