The Hunter College School of Social Work has sold its mid-block site at 129 West 79th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues to the Brodsky Organization that will build a new $135 million facility for the school on Third Avenue from 118th to 119th Streets in East Harlem.

Once the new building is completed, Brodsky will erected a residential condominium building on the 79th Street site, which is now occupied by a 10-story building that was erected in 1967 and expanded in 1988 and designed, both times by Wank Adams Slavin Associates. In their fine book, "The A.I.A. Guide to New York City, Third Edition," Norval White and Elliot Willensky noted that the fortress-like building "sports an interesting faacde of vertically incised window openings in a gray terra-cotta (bottom) and white iron-spot brick(top) wall."

In an article by Glenn Collins in today's edition of The New York Times, a rendering of the new building in East Harlem designed by Cooper, Robertson & Partners, and shown here, was displayed. The article said that "in a multiparty real estate deal of byzantine complexity, the school's current building will be sold, and $40 million of the proceeds, along with state construction funds, will be used for the larger, eight-story school building uptown."

The new school will be known as the Lois V. and Samuel J. Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, after its benefactors. The school's current building, leased by Hunter, was built and expanded with $5.675 million from the Lois and Samuel J. Silberman Fund. The Silbermans retained ownership of the land and tower in conjunction with the New York Community Trust, a nonprofit organization that oversees charitable gifts," according to Mr. Collins's article.

"The trust and the Silbermans, after working out the plan in secrecy, have signed an agreement to sell the current school's land and building for $65 million to a private developer, Daniel Brodsky of the Brodsky Organization. They are to donate $40 million of that to help pay for construction of the new school; the university's largest previous gift was $30 million for its Honors College in 2006," the article continued, adding that "under a separate agreement, Mr. Brodsky will build the social work school at the new property and deliver it at cost, though he will receive a lump-sum fee for administrative expenses."

The remaining $95 million for the new building will come from state education funds appropriated last spring. The leftover $25 million paid to the Silberman fund for the current building will be used to establish a program of social work grants "in perpetuity," Lorie A. Slutsky, president of the community trust, told The Times.

The article indicated that the state has already appropriated $95 million for the deal and it quoted J. Dean Amro, a partner at the Brodsky Organization, as stating "we are good for the $65 million; we are not borrowing any money." In indicated that the new residential building on 79th Street would probably contain luxury residential condominiums.

The Brodsky Organization recently entered a deal to building a new mixed-use property for the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea.

Mr. Silberman, a former president of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York in the 1960s, died in 2000 at the age of 84. His wife, Lois, 87, told Mr. Collins that the deal was "something he would have loved."