The City University of New York will put down roots next month on a gracious, tree-lined stretch of West 67th Street, creating classrooms, seminar halls, and faculty offices for its Honors College in a landmarked brownstone.

With a $30 million gift from its benefactor, William Macaulay, a CUNY alumnus, the university purchased the property from the 92nd Street Y, which vacated the building last week.

A junior at Hunter College, Christine Curella, 21, said the new building gives the six-year-old William E. Macaulay Honors College, in which she is enrolled, “a real permanence and the resources to build a lasting community for us.”

Many of the students in the Honors College, which was inaugurated to attract high-achieving high school seniors to the city’s public four-year colleges, have scooped up prestigious awards such as Truman and Fulbright scholarships and have found internships and jobs on par with their Ivy League counterparts.

Since its inception, the program has been housed in the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown, where Honors College students and faculty said it was often difficult to stake claim to a filing cabinet, let alone reserve meeting rooms and lecture halls. “We would float and didn’t really have a place where we could host meetings like student government, student organizations, or for community service projects,” a senior at Brooklyn College, Ryan Merola, 21, said. “It was usually a bit of a runaround to find space.”

The dean of the Honors College, Ann Kirschner, said the program had been looking for a space of its own that “represented the vitality of New York in many different ways.” She said the townhouse at 35 W. 67th St. is ideal, given its proximity to Central Park, Lincoln Center, the Juilliard School, and the corporate offices of Time Warner and ABC News.

Ms. Kirschner said the new campus would strengthen students’ sense of community by giving them a place to host concerts, film screenings, and student activities meetings. About 1,200 Honors College students are enrolled in CUNY schools throughout the five boroughs. “Most of our students are commuter students, so we have to find interesting ways to bring them together — taking into account that it’s not easy to get from Staten Island to Manhattan — because we want to give them an identity as one student body,” Ms. Kirschner told The New York Sun. “This building is going to be a tremendous tool.”

The $30 million gift was the largest-ever awarded to the university and inspired CUNY to rename the Honors College after its donor. Mr. Macaulay is the chief executive of a private equity firm that specializes in energy investments, First Reserve.