Mount Sinai Hospital has retained Newmark Knight Frank to sell the apartment building at 1212 Fifth Avenue and an adjacent parcel that can be developed with a transfer of 315,000 square feet of development rights to create a 32-story residential condominium tower.

1212 Fifth Avenue is a 15-story prewar apartment building on the southeast corner at 102nd Street and it contains 76 units "primarily occupied by Mount Sinai entities and employees who will vacate apartments and office and professional space as directed by Mount Sinai."

The hospital says that "the apartments not occupied by Mount Sinai entities or employees (the 'non-Mount Sinai tenants') are either rent-controlled (9 units) or rent-stabilized (3 units.). The building is currently heated by steam from Mount Sinai and "the successful bidder must arrange a new heat source for 1212 Fifth Avenue because the Mount Sinai steam will be cut off at a scheduled date to be agreed with Mount Sinai at signing of a purchase, sale and development agreement."

The new building will have "certain Mount Sinai mechanical facilities to be located in the base" and the developer "will receive fee title to all space except the space reserved for Mount Sinai for such mechanical facilities." Contiguous and adjacent to the new building will be a planned Mount Sinai Center for Science and Medicine, which is a separate project. The new building will have a courtyard for pedestrian and vehicle access between it and 1212 Fifth Avenue, according to the hospital.

The 16-story apartment building at 1200 Fifth Avenue on the northeast corner at 101st Street was sold by the Mount Sinai Medical Center to Joseph Nakash, Joseph Chetrit, Lloyd Goldman and Mann Realty for about $61 million.

The building is just to the north of the famous medical center, which had owned the rental apartment building for about three decades.

The building was erected in 1928 and designed by Emery Roth, the architect of such major residential skyscrapers as the San Remo and the Beresford, both on Central Park West, and 870, 880, 993 and 1125 Fifth Avenue.

The new owners of the building began a condominium conversion. The building has 59 apartments and when it was sold in 2004 about half of them were occupied by tenants covered by rent control and rent stabilization. By mid-2006, about a third of the units had been sold with prices for studio units starting at about $760,000, two- and three-bedroom apartments with prices between about $1,400,000 and $4,700,000 and five-and six-bedroom units with prices starting at about $5,500,000.