FINANCIAL DISTRICT — Trinity Church’s 30-year-old preschool is heading to a new location, as the wealthy Downtown parish moves forward with plans to redevelop its ministry office buildings, and top them with a 25-story residential tower.
Rev. James Cooper, the church’s rector, announced to parishioners in a recent email that the Trinity Preschool would be relocating to a new ground floor space at 100 Church St., in Sept. 2014.
The new spot will be able to accommodate the same number of students that are currently taught at the preschool’s longtime home at 68 Trinity Place — a building that sits directly behind the historic Broadway church, and is slated for a massive reconstruction.
“The preschool is indeed moving, but it will remain very much a ministry of Trinity Wall Street, and for that I am grateful,” Cooper said in his email. “The new site will support the high level of excellence in early childhood education for which Trinity Preschool is known.”
Cooper said the design plans for the new school have been underway for several months, and they hope to start construction in early 2014 on the new school.
This summer, the parish announced its controversial plans to replace the pair of ministry office buildings at 68-74 Trinity Place, and top the new building with a 400 ft. residential tower.
In July, architecture firm Pelli Clarke Pelli, the team behind the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place and Midtown’s Bloomberg Tower, won their bid to design their glass and metal tower for the church.
But the plan for a grand overhaul of the building has been at the center of bitter church infighting. Cooper told parishioners he wanted to devote more of the church's funds to turn the space into a new state-of-the-art complex with a grand lobby and offices, classrooms and auditoriums — as well as possibly build a condo tower, DNAinfo New York reported last year.
But some in the church had said the money should be spent on helping the needy instead.
A Trinity Church spokeswoman had said in July that the anticipated income from the residential tower would defray the costs of building the ministry's new facility.
Cooper previously announced that he would step down as leader of the parish in 2015.
