By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN — The city is aggressively pursuing the Peck Slip Post Office as a new 400-seat elementary school for lower Manhattan.
The city’s School Construction Authority bid on the property earlier this year, and since then the US Postal Service has been in touch several times to ask questions about the idea of a school, said Kenrick Ou, director of real estate services for the SCA.
"The Post Office, we think, is taking our offer very seriously," Ou said at a meeting of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s school overcrowding task force on Thursday.
Silver said the new elementary school would serve the urgent need for more school seats downtown, and he is pushing the Postal Service to strike a deal with the city, even if private developers submit higher bids.
"No use for this building would be as valuable to lower Manhattan as a new school," Silver wrote to Postmaster General John Potter on Sept. 13.
The Postal Service has not set a timeline for a decision on the property, and a spokeswoman declined to comment.
If the city wins the bid, Ou said it would take at least three years to design and build the K-5 school at 1 Peck Slip, near the South Street Seaport. The city may construct an addition to the four-story, 70,800-square-foot-building or may knock it down and start over. Either way, a small retail post office would remain on the ground floor, Ou said.
The city Landmarks Preservation Commission would have to approve any substantial change to the building, because it sits in the South Street Seaport Historic District.
The need for new school seats was especially apparent this fall, as lower Manhattan’s kindergarten population surged 30 percent, to 375 children, the city said.
The influx resulted in a waitlist at the perennially popular P.S. 234 in TriBeCa, but the school was eventually able to offer a seat to all waitlisted families by opening an extra class, Principal Lisa Ripperger said.
Kindergarten waitlists could recur in 2011, because the city Department of Education has decided not to change the school zone lines.
The city will not do another rezoning until lower Manhattan has a new school, which will take at least a couple years, said Elizabeth Rose, a portfolio planner for the DOE.
