Drama Over Zeta
Is an eight-story charter school coming to 181st and Broadway?
The empty lot on the corner of 181st and Broadway is a notable eyesore right in the heart of the neighborhood. The Coliseum Theatre was there for decades, but it closed in 2011. A proposal to turn the site into a shopping center went nowhere. In 2020, crews razed the building.
A newcomer to the Heights may be building there soon: Zeta Charter Schools.
Last month Kenneth Miraski, an architect working on the project, told the Community Board 12 Land Use Committee that Zeta is proposing an eight-story building that would serve 1,050 students and include a "full high school gym with bleacher seating," a black box theater, a chess room, and a rooftop playing field. The team hopes to start construction in 2027, and a Zeta executive told the committee they aim to welcome students in fall 2029.
The School
Zeta was founded in 2017 by Emily Kim, a former executive at Success Academy, a pioneering charter school network known for high test scores and tight discipline. Zeta currently serves around 4,000 students, almost all of them Black and/or Latino, spread across eight New York City campuses. Its mailers and ads are ubiquitous in the Heights. (In its most recent annual tax filings, Zeta reports spending more than $1.7 million on advertising and promotion.) Student test scores consistently exceed city averages.
Zeta’s presentation to the Community Board says that it receives approximately six to nine applications for every open seat. Now, the network is looking to expand its footprint as its student body ages up into high school.
The Obstacle
Zeta doesn't need any special zoning permission to build on most of the site. But there’s a problem: Roughly one-quarter of the lot falls within an area along Broadway that's zoned C8-3, which means it’s designated "for automotive and other heavy commercial services." (It's been zoned that way since 1961; it's not totally clear to me why that's the case.)
To put a school on that part of the property, Zeta needs to get a special permit from the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals, or BSA. But first, the proposal comes up before our local, volunteer Community Board 12, which will advise the BSA on whether or not to approve the project.
Charter schools often get blowback. But the initial hangup from the Community Board was not about the upsides or downsides of charters.
More than anything else, it was about cars.
Kids Versus Cars
Broadway and 181st is a busy intersection. Community Board members and officers from NYPD’s 34th Precinct, which is located down the street from the proposed building site, have raised concerns about (a) vehicles hitting children, and (b) pick-up and drop-off hubbub jamming up traffic.
“We can’t have traffic congestion, vehicular congestion, on Broadway, because it’s so vital,” said Jim Berlin, a Community Board member, during one meeting.
“There’s always so much traffic there every day,” NYPD officer Virginia Peralta told the Land Use Committee. The fear, she said, is that “if there’s students there, you know, they’re going to be running in the streets and getting hurt and stuff like that.”
Community Board members had other car-related questions, including whether fumes from the gas station next door would affect Zeta students’ health.
One point of concern is Zeta’s elementary and middle school site on 218th Street in Inwood, which members described as a “traffic nightmare” and “a little bit of chaos.”
I visited the campus on Tuesday afternoon during pick-up time. The process looked orderly — I didn’t hear a single honk — and there were at least three NYPD traffic officers on hand. Children in purple uniforms played tag on the sidewalk along 9th Avenue. There were lines of double-parked cars around the school, and a few cars along the M100 bus route had covered-up license plates, seemingly to avoid tickets from enforcement cameras mounted on buses.
Zeta and its representatives argue that the proposed building will generate much less traffic because it will serve older students who can take themselves to school.
David Briggs at Zeta sent over a statement about the proposal. “Our new school will bring another high-quality middle and high school option to the neighborhood for all students who live in Washington Heights and Inwood, whether or not they currently attend Zeta,” it said. “We look forward to further engaging with local community members — many of whom are Zeta parents — as our new school comes to life.”
Does Any Of This Matter?
Community Board 12 Chair Anthony Viola told me the goal is for the group to vote in April on whether or not to recommend the proposal to the BSA. The recommendation isn’t binding, though, and the BSA is free to ignore it.
Even if the BSA does nix Zeta’s application, Zeta could modify the plans and build a school on the site that doesn’t trigger a zoning issue. At one point during a committee meeting, Jeremy Kozin, a lawyer representing Zeta, tried to reframe the argument less as school versus no school and more as snazzy school versus less snazzy school. “The difference between having the approval versus not having the approval is so that the school can have amenities,” he said. “The school can be built here in a more constrained fashion, without some of these wonderful things, or it can be built on the full totality of the site.”
Viola told me he isn’t so sure that Zeta will build on the site if it faces significant pushback from the BSA.
Zeta is bringing out the big guns to make its pitch. On Thursday night, Emily Kim, the founder and CEO, visited the Community Board 12 Youth and Education Committee to give a presentation and field questions. Topics that came up included college prep, student discipline — and, yes, traffic.
(A blanket disclosure for all stories about schools: I have children enrolled in local public schools and childcare institutions.)
