Daniel Axelrod Times Herald-Record @dan_axelrod

TUXEDO NYUs School of Medicine is close to selling the 87,000-square-foot Sterling Forest research center where its Department of Environmental Medicine has operated for decades.

NYUs leaders declined to provide a statement about the sale, but they confirmed public information about it, said how long NYU had been there and explained what will happen to the sites researchers.

Just two months after marketing the complex, university staff are conducting due diligence reviews of prospective buyers after receiving multiple offers on the seven-acre complex, which is listed at $3.91 million.

For more than two decades, NYU medical school researchers have conducted important research at the site, including testing vaccines for AIDS, hepatitis and other deadly diseases.

But with the facility aging, NYU is selling it and merging its local medical research center into properties closer to its main campus in Manhattan, instead of reusing the complex for other educational purposes.

The sites two-story, stone, 1920s-era East Building is the complexs oldest structure, said broker Robert Scherreik, executive managing director for the Newburgh-based Hudson Valley office of Cushman & Wakefield/Pyramid Brokerage Company.

The East Building began as an elementary school. Later owners of the site, which sits 33 miles from New York City, added the West Building (1962) and the South Building (1972), which have steel frames and brick-and-stone exteriors.

Theyre extremely well-built structures, with very good bones and an absolutely beautiful location in the midst of New Yorks Sterling Forest State Park, and theyre near population centers in northern New Jersey, Rockland County and New York City, Scherreik said.

The buildings have been renovated and improved a number of times over the years, including with energy-efficient windows and HVAC systems, and theyd be perfect for educational or office space, Scherreik said.

They do, however, need to be substantially renovated to meet needs other than those of a research lab, he said.

Despite NYU's positive research contributions, the lab may be best known locally for what university officials did with the chimps housed there after closing its Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates in 1995.

NYU leaders ignored a public outcry against transferring the center, and roughly 100 of its chimps, to the New Mexico-based lab of Fred Coulston, a notorious toxicologist cited by federal agencies for viciously abusing and killing primates.

Subsequent investigations by federal agencies and the Times Herald-Record revealed that Coulston spent years torturing and killing the NYU chimps until the feds ordered that he transfer 51 of the NYU survivors to sanctuaries.

Another roughly 100 LEMSIP chimps would have faced the same fate were it not for NYU veterinarian C. James Mahoney, who smuggled them out of the Tuxedo facility and found them homes.

daxelrod@th-record.com

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NYU's School of Medicine reviewing offers for Sterling Forest site - Times Herald-Record