Community members in Midtown are looking at ways to reopen the Turtle Bay Music School that served the neighborhood for almost 100 years before its closure in 2020. 

Jeffrey Levenberg, a music professor who moved to Turtle Bay in 2022, is leading the effort to reopen the school, emphasizing its international educational techniques and proximity to the United Nations, he said. 

“The golden vision is that there is a restored community music school in Turtle Bay that connects all of the countries represented and seeking representation in the United Nations, and is represented in the city of New York and Greater New York City in general,” Levenberg said. 

First opened in 1925, the school served thousands of children, including up to 5,000 annually before it shut down. Students from various socio-economic backgrounds attended Turtle Bay Music School, including the children of former President Donald Trump, actress Uma Thurman, and kids from underserved areas around Manhattan. 

Levenberg said one of the goals of reopening the school would be to broaden its curriculum to include the intersectionality of music with finance, healthcare and technology. 

Stu Desser, a member of the Youth and Education Committee for Community Board Six, believes an interdisciplinary approach to music education will interest potential students.

“I very much appreciate connections between different disciplines,” Desser said, at a September committee meeting. “I like the idea that music is simply the core of a broader academic scholarship, and I think that’s what would attract people.”

At the same meeting, Jonathan D’Errico, the committee chair, said the project would likely be financed, at least in part, by public funding. “This keeps sounding, at least to me, more and more like a good fit for government funding whether on the local level or above,” he said.

Figuring out how to pay for the school will be a top priority, considering financial insolvency has been cited as the reason Turtle Bay Music School was forced to close down in the first place.

In 2018, Turtle Bay Music School sold its longtime building on East 52nd Street and moved to a new location in Murray Hill, on East 38th Street, by a roadway leading to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. The school purchased the new venue for $15 million, of which over $7 million was borrowed.

Enrollment at the new location plummeted, and the school permanently closed in January 2020, a year and a half after the move.

Ed Sirlin, the former Turtle Bay Music School board president from 2013 to 2020, said that trying to stay in the old Turtle Bay location would have actually been more expensive in the long run. 

“Everything we did with passion and the right intention,” Sirlin said. “The cost of trying to fix that old building was more expensive than moving.” 

Levenberg is now working with community partners and landlords on Third Avenue to secure a location for the school in a Class B building— an older property with character that’s been renovated. His “dream building” would be in the Crystal Pavilion office building that’s near shopping and restaurants, such as Smith & Wollensky steakhouse, he said.

Edmund Chiarello, president of the New York State School Music Association, said that music programs like Turtle Bay Music School can help develop essential skills inextricably connected to all aspects of life. 

“Music education fosters creativity and promotes cultural connections,” Chiarello said. “It enhances problem solving, teamwork, goal setting, self-expression, coordination, memory skills, self-confidence and self-esteem, concentration, poise, and the very human spirit.”