NEW YORK CITY-Bellevue Hospital, New York University Medical Center and Beth Israel Medical Center, to name a few, cluster along Manhattan’s so-called “Hospital Row,” an East Side corridor that also includes New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical College, Mount Sinai Hospital and School of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Rockefeller University. Yet the city’s longstanding potential as a center for commercial bioscience has thus far been largely untapped, due mainly to a lack of lab space.

That may change with the advent of the Alexandria Center for Life Science, a biotech campus that marked the completion and delivery of its first phase Thursday. At a launch ceremony Thursday morning, Robert Steele, deputy mayor for economic development, described the project as “the first endeavor like this in New York, and it’s just the first.”

The 3.7-acre campus at 450 E. 29th St. near the East River, which will contain up to 1.1 million square feet when built out, is the city’s maiden commercial biotech venture on such a scale. It also marks the initial foray into the New York market by life sciences REIT Alexandria Real Estate Equities.

Choosing a Pasadena, CA-based developer that had never built here before took a certain amount of courage by the Bloomberg administration, Alexandria chairman/CEO Joel Marcus tells GlobeSt.com. And he acknowledges some “trepidation” on the company’s part in responding to the city’s RFP for a biotech campus, although that nervousness was eased by the fact that the REIT has developed some 11.7 million square feet of life sciences space in markets across the US.

Not only the challenges of entering the New York market per se loomed over the project during its gestation period. In opening remarks at the launch ceremony, Marcus cited the “near-collapse” of the financial markets, the “unprecedented” consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government’s “assault” on the healthcare system, which fortunately resulted in a more reasonable reform package than was initially feared. And launching a biotech cluster where none existed before required “an enormous public/private effort,” Steele said.

In terms of dollars and cents, that public/private partnership entailed a $200-million investment by Alexandria, $27 million in New York State funds and about $500,000 from the city. The Bloomberg administration also provided the land: a disused parcel that once contained a hospital laundry facility. As it opens, the Alexandria campus’ first phase is already about 90% leased, with its first tenant, ImClone, signing on for more than 90,000 square feet in July 2009.

More than that, though, the biotech venture required some long-term vision on the city’s part, Marcus tells GlobeSt.com, and he credits Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s business sense with being a driver. At Thursday’s ceremony, Bloomberg cited his administration’s efforts to launch a commercial life sciences sector, with the BioBAT incubator facility being built at Brooklyn Army Terminal slated to add another 400,000 square feet of lab space when it’s completed.

Yet Bloomberg also put development of the city’s life sciences industry into a broader context. “This is one of the most wonderful things to happen to the city,” Bloomberg said Thursday. “Now we have to find a way to do this every day,” by diversifying the city’s economy beyond its financial services base. “We have to make sure we reach out to all industries,” he added.