On 61st Street since 2009
About the nursery
Five rooms, each permitted for one age band rather than shared between two, and a director whose office door is on the corridor the children use. Everything else on this page follows from that.
Why five rooms rather than nine
Maricel opened this nursery in 2009 after eleven years in a much larger centre where, by her own account, she spent more time managing a waiting list than watching a room. The shape of this place is a reaction to that.
Five rooms, each permitted for a single age band, is a deliberately small operation. It caps what we can earn and it means we turn families away most months. What it buys is that the person who leads your child’s room has led it for years, that the director knows every child’s name, and that nobody here is running a room they have not been trained for because the rota was short.
What we publish that most nurseries do not
Our tuition, in full, before you visit. Our ratios, and the fact that they are a legal floor rather than an achievement. The temperature at which we will ring and ask you to collect your child. Roughly how long the waiting list for each room actually takes. And the fact that the City will educate your three- or four-year-old for nothing, which is the first thing we raise and the thing it costs us most to say.
None of that is generosity. A family who finds out in year two that they could have had this free, or that the ratio they were quoted was the legal minimum described as a feature, does not stay and is right not to. We would rather have fewer families who know exactly what they are buying.
There are no children in any photograph here
That is a decision rather than an omission, and it has its own page. Every image on this site shows the rooms, the materials, the food or the educators — because the environment is what you are actually buying, and because the children in nursery marketing are somebody’s real children who did not choose to be advertising.
What we will not do
We will not tell you your two-year-old is ready to move up because the next room has a space. We will not teach reading to four-year-olds because a family asked. We will not describe a distressed child as having settled well. We will not take a place we cannot safely honour for a child with an allergy or a plan. And we will not keep a feverish child so that you do not have to leave work, because a nursery that would do that for you did it for the family whose child infected yours.
The arrangement, in full
What a week here actually buys
One age band per room
Five rooms, five permitted age groups, and a room leader who has led that room for years rather than covering it this term.
Every meal cooked here
Breakfast, a cooked lunch and two snacks, made in the kitchen in this building by somebody whose name you know.
Tuition published in advance
Every rate is on the website before you tour. A rate withheld until you have met the staff is a rate negotiated against sunk feeling.
Rooms not merged at six
From five o’clock children stay in their own room with an adult they know, which is exactly where the industry economises.
A written note every day
Sleep, food, mood and one specific thing that happened, including the difficult parts, from the adult who was in the room.
No borrowed authority
No accreditation claimed, no awards, no star ratings and no invented permit number. The checkable record is the City’s, and we point you at it.
If your child is three or four, the City may do this for nothing. New York City gives every resident three- and four-year-old a free, full-day place in 3-K or Pre-K for All, regardless of family income or immigration status. For the 2026-2027 year that meant children born in 2023 for 3-K and 2022 for pre-K, with applications open from 14 January to 27 February 2026. We are raising this before we quote you a weekly rate, on the pages where you are most likely to be about to pay us, because a family paying for a four-year-old's daytime hours without having applied is usually spending money the City would have covered. Families still pay us for these ages for good reasons — hours beyond what a free place covers, or not getting one — and neither of those is a reason to leave the question unasked.
There are no children in any photograph on this site. There is not a single child in any photograph on this website. Every image here shows our rooms, our materials, our food or our educators, and that is a decision rather than a gap in the budget. Marketing photographs of children are somebody else's children, used to sell a place to you; and a daily app photograph of a smiling child tells you about one second of a nine-hour day and nothing about the other thirty-two thousand. What we send home instead is a written note about sleep, food, mood and what actually happened, from the person who was in the room.
Tuesday and Thursday mornings, while the children are here
Come and see the room
A tour here happens during a session, in the room your child would actually be in, at the time of day they would be in it. You meet the person who leads that room rather than only the director, and you see the noise and the mess that are genuinely there. It takes an hour. If your child is three or four we will ask whether you have applied for free 3-K or Pre-K for All before we quote you a rate, because a good many families should not be paying us at all.