Manhattan Country School Faces Foreclosure After Bank Says It Failed to Pay Back $3 Mil

Manhattan Country School has been hit with a foreclosure lawsuit filed by Flushing Bank, alleging that the Upper West Side private school has defaulted on its $3 million mortgage.

The school first took out a $2.5 million mortgage from the bank in 2017, according to a loan agreement signed by Michèle Solá, the school’s director. Property records show that the loan was increased to $2,999,999 in 2019.

In June 2020, the school and the bank reached an agreement to defer loan payments for the rest of the calendar year due to business impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, court filings show. But according to a complaint filed by Flushing Bank, the school failed to fulfill payment obligations outlined by the deferment agreement, and entered into forbearance between September 2022 and October 2023.

The school then failed to make the monthly payments outlined in the forbearance agreement, which ended on July 1st, Flushing Bank alleges. Due to the lack of payments, the school has defaulted on its mortgage, and it now faces foreclosure, according to the complaint.

Manhattan Country School, which goes from prekindergarten through eighth grade, occupies a building at 150 W. 85th St., between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues, which formerly housed the New School’s Mannes School of Music. MCS purchased the building for $28 million in 2015, according to the real estate publication, the Commercial Observer.

The not-for-profit school is known for its progressivism: “radical love is at the heart of MCS,” reads its website’s “about” page. Manhattan Country School was founded in 1966 by Gus and Marty Trowbridge, who were inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. to put the principles of equity and integration into practice. Two hundred fifty six students are currently enrolled, according to its website.

It maintains a second campus upstate in Roxbury, New York—a farm that doubles as an education setting for students, who learn to garden and tend to animals, receiving “hands-on learning” about ecology, agricultural sciences and more.

Annual tuition can cost up to $51,000 to $57,000, depending on grade level, though the school employs a sliding scale tuition model that takes family income into account. According to the school’s Form 990 tax filings, its net income was in the red last year by around $2.5 million in 2023.

West Side Spirit has reached out to co-head of school Maiya Jackson and school director Michèle Solá for comment but had not heard back by presstime.