Yale University said it has received a $150 million gift from Stephen A. Schwarzman, a 1969 alum and chairman and CEO of the global investment firm Blackstone Group.
The school will use the money to establish a campus center in Schwarzman’s name, which will include a grand main hall, lounges, gallery and performance spaces, restaurants and meeting rooms.
The Schwarzman Center will be created by renovating and restoring an 88,300-square-foot complex located at the center of the Yale campus that includes the Commons building and Memorial Hall.
Yale has retained Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to advise the school on the renovation, programming and staffing of the center, which would open in 2020.
By then, Yale expects its student body to have grown 15 percent, to more than 12,000, due to the addition of two new residential colleges.
Blackstone, co- founded by Schwarzman in 1985, managed $310 billion in assets as of March 31.
It’s not his first massive philanthropic gift. In 2007 he gave $100 million to the New York Public Library. And in 2013, he gave another $100 million to a master’s degree program at Tsinghua University in China.
The gift ranks among the largest for Yale, which received a $250 million donation from Charles Johnson in 2013.
