Eccentric Upper West Sider Bill Ackman.
Photo: John Lamparski/Bloomberg/Getty Images
The billionaire Bill Ackman and his wife, the architect and designer Neri Oxman, are building a medical center on the Upper West Side devoted to the “comprehensive study of the brain,” reports Fortune, which tells us the institution will focus “on everything from rehab to longevity to nutrition.” To build the place, Ackman’s foundation spent $188 million on a former Chrysler showroom at West 66th Street and West End Avenue, and it’s in contract to spend $70 million more on the building next door, the former ABC studio that audiences piled into for live tapings of The View. Across the two buildings, there’s about 700,000 square feet of space for labs, surgical suites, and conference rooms — a scale that dwarfs Columbia University’s similar brain institute farther uptown, the Zuckerman Institute, which is a mere 450,000 square feet. This is a surprising endeavor for about half a dozen reasons, meaning it’s not at all surprising for Ackman. He made his fortune with left-field investments, and these days, he spends lots of time on X drafting extremely long contrarian posts that end in the phrase “Why am I wrong?”
What’s immediately odd is the choice of site, which faces West End Avenue at West 66th Street. Manhattan’s medical corridor is mostly condensed on the far East Side, in part because doctors tend to find it convenient to zip from hospital to hospital there. Many also have private practices nearby and apartments within walking distance that make it easier to stay on call. Like the barons of New York a century ago, Ackman seems to be trying to shift the landscape to create another corridor, one fitted to his own interests. He and Oxman are Upper West Siders with a Norman Foster–designed penthouse — a glass box atop a 1927 co-op on West 77th Street. From there, Ackman commutes to his offices on West 55th Street and 11th Avenue in a Rafael Viñoly–designed penthouse, a glass box stacked atop a former Ford showroom. Draw a line between the two, and the institute falls right in the middle.
A listing shot for 125 West End Avenue, a former Chrysler dealership Ackman is turning into part of a new campus devoted to the study of the human brain.
Photo: Taconic Partners
There is one major hospital over there — Mount Sinai West, at 59th Street and Tenth Avenue — and Fortune says Mount Sinai will be the center’s partner. Still, Ackman isn’t just giving the cash to the hospital network with a deal to put his name on a new building. He’s buying the properties via his own foundation and is framing the center as the first example of what he says could be a new model, one in which researchers share in the profits from their discoveries the way a doctor with a start-up can. As Fortune reports, the center will be “structured to spin out for-profit companies — devices, molecules, and treatments for brain injury and stroke patients.” Mount Sinai’s role in this isn’t entirely clear (it demurred from putting out a press release), but Ackman seems to be relying on the network to help him carry out his vision and has said he’s already staffing the board — which will include the biohacker Andrew Huberman, whose history with women is troubling.
Ackman may not care about that, given that he’s already personally funding the research of a disgraced former MIT professor. An independent medical center could allow Ackman to hire that researcher without institutional pushback and to back any woo-woo ideas about health care he may have. Ackman, let’s not forget, helped fund RFK Jr.’s campaign and endorsed his kookiness on vaccines. He spent this week retweeting headlines from the show trial of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
A listing shot from a brochure advertising the research labs that could be built at 125 West End Avenue.
Photo: Taconic Partners
Still, Ackman is framing this project as a deeply personal one — a gift to two of the women in his life. Oxman lost her mother after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and this February, Ackman’s eldest daughter, Lucy, was found unresponsive in her apartment after a brain hemorrhage that crushed her optic nerve and destroyed her ability to speak. Her doctors saved her life and preserved some of her sight; Ackman says he hopes his future institute may soon learn from her records. But he also told Fortune that he and his family considered building a similar institute five years ago and even toured this site but “the price for the real estate and staffing an institute was too high.”
What has changed since then is the market for a very specific type of commercial real estate. Right now, about a quarter of the space in New York buildings designed to serve as medical labs is sitting vacant, according to the latest report from CBRE. One Long Island City development built for an estimated $200 million sold last month for $87 million. The buildings for which Ackman is paying about $258 million were sold for $230 million in 2019 to Taconic Partners and Nuveen Real Estate, which, according to a recent brochure, overhauled the space at major expense, then managed to find only one tenant for half of one of its seven floors. (Calls and emails for comment to the developer and leasing brokers were not returned and neither was a similar request to Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation.) “The partners who own this building probably took a little haircut,” said Bill Hartman, a vice-chairman at CBRE who estimated Ackman got it for less than half of what the developers had spent overall. “Bill got a great value.”
A listing shot for 125 West End Avenue shows a mix of office space and research labs.
Photo: Taconic Partners
His daughter’s medical travails may be part of his motivation, but Ackman may also simply sniff a real-estate opportunity — as he did back in 2010 when he tried to turn Stuy Town into a co-op or when he tried to flip his own office building on 11th Avenue for twice what he had paid. As for why labs are now begging for billionaires to buy them, Ackman can thank his friend RFK Jr.: By pulling federal funding for medical research, the administration is cutting off demand for new labs. Ackman’s project may be filling the gap.
