Sometimes you get more than you pay for.
City officials yesterday unveiled a gleaming new five-story public school — the first to open on the Upper East Side in almost 50 years — and its $45 million price tag didn’t cost taxpayers a penny.
That’s because the city leased the air rights above the property to developers to build a 34-story residential property atop the 80,000-square-foot school — and that money paid for the educational institution below.
The site, at 91st Street and First Avenue, previously housed a school condemned and closed in 2000. The property also was the site of a crane collapse that killed two men working on the residential tower in 2008.
The developers, the DeMatteis Organizations and The Mattone Group, were able to erect the posh tower after leasing the L-shaped property from the city for 75 years at a cost of nearly $1 billion.
“This would be a great building if we had to pay for it,” Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said of the new home for MS 114. “For free — it’s off the charts.”
The middle-school kids, who had formerly been housed in a 116-year-old building on 78th Street, moved into the new, state-of-the art school this month.
Students said they haven’t been able to get enough of its gargantuan gym, wide hallways and ultra-modern amenities.
“All the new equipment that we have — in the science room, the art room, the music room and just in general in every classroom — is absolutely amazing,” said eighth-grader Stanca Iacob.
The development was part of a revival of a long-dormant public-private partnership overseen by the Educational Construction Fund, which helped build more than a dozen schools with private money in the 1970s.