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New York|Aging N.Y.C. Seminary’s Prayers Are Answered With a Lease by Vanderbilt
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/nyregion/nyc-seminary-episcopal-vanderbilt-university.html
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The Tennessee university has promised to make repairs to the General Theological Seminary buildings as it establishes a satellite campus in Chelsea.
Nov. 4, 2025, 3:43 p.m. ET
The seminary sits on the site of an old apple orchard that Clement Clarke Moore, the author of the poem that begins, “’Twas the night before Christmas,” gave the church in 1819. The first building went up in 1827, followed by a ring of others on what is now a block of extremely valuable land in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City.
Now, the General Theological Seminary, the oldest seminary of the Episcopal Church and a quintessentially New York institution, is beginning a new chapter. Its 13 Collegiate Gothic buildings and leafy quad are to become a satellite campus of Vanderbilt University, the elite academic institution based in Nashville.
In September, Vanderbilt finalized a $44 million, 99-year-lease with the seminary, announcing that it will use the campus for two academic programs: a residential program for about 100 undergraduates for a semester of their junior or senior years, and a graduate program offering a Master of Science in business and technology.
For Vanderbilt, the move marks the first stage in an ambitious plan to build satellite campuses in several U.S. cities, taking advantage of what it calls its financial strengths to expand offerings when many of its peer institutions are tightening their belts.
“We call it a study away,” Daniel Diermeier, Vanderbilt’s chancellor, said in an interview last week, as he described the concept shaping the new campuses in Manhattan and elsewhere. If students have a career interest, such as in finance or the arts, that is better pursued somewhere other than Nashville, Vanderbilt wants to offer “the opportunity for our students to be fully emerged into the environment there, and explore, whether it’s projects or internships or classes that are connected with that.”
On Tuesday, Vanderbilt’s plan surmounted a key hurdle, receiving approval from the New York State Board of Regents, which oversees schools in the state, to open as soon as next fall. Now, a potentially bigger challenge looms.
