Council Gives Thumbs-Up to NYC Tech Campus

NEW YORK CITY-The City Council on Wednesday afternoon gave its blessing to Cornell University's plan to build an applied sciences and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island. The final stop on the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure trail is the signature of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has endorsed the plan.

“The new school will be a tremendous boon, not only for my City Council district, but for the entire Big Apple,” Council Member Jessica Lappin, whose district includes Roosevelt Island, says in a release. Lappin had formed a community coalition to champion the idea of building a campus in Manhattan, “and specifically Roosevelt Island.”

The council's approval came after Lappin secured a number of concessions from the Bloomberg administration and from Cornell, which is partnering with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to build the two-million-square-foot Cornell NYC Tech campus. Among other commitments, the city has pledged to contribute funding to a one-year summer ferry service pilot program, while the university has agreed to maximize the use of barging, thus minimizing the number of construction vehicles on the island; and to “adopt” PS/IS 217, the local school on Roosevelt Island, by providing teacher training and support; after school programming; tech events; career day options; and hardware and software programming development.

The partnership of Cornell and Technion was selected as the winner of the city's Applied Sciences Initiative in December 2011. The plan is to construct new academic facilities and housing on the 11-acre former campus of Goldwater Hospital over a 30-year period. When completed, it will accommodate 2,500 students and nearly 280 faculty members.

In announcing the partnership as the winner of the initiative, Bloomberg said Cornell and Technion's joint submission stood out for its “boldness” and “ambitiousness.” He said the joint proposal called for the most students, the most faculty and the most building space, over two million square feet. In this day in age, great universities know that they have to expand their locations, their horizons, their facilities and their interests. Here Cornell and Technion have definitely showed the courage to do that.”

The campus will comprise laboratories, teaching and resource space, student housing, incubators and accelerators, research and development space and a conference center for campus visitors and public events. Cornell and Technion agreed to a 99-year lease agreement for the Goldwater site, and also agreed to open an off-site location before construction begins. This they did, with the first Cornell NYC Tech getting under way this past January at the Google campus at 111 Eighth Ave.

Last month, Qualcomm founder and Cornell alumnus Irwin Jacobs and his wife Joan made a $133-million gift to the university and Technion to create the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute at the new campus. “Cornell Tech will bring a sharp increase in science and engineering teaching, attract students from around the world, and spin off new local companies and thousands of new jobs, and inject billions of dollars into our economy,” Bloomberg said when the gift was announced. He added that the Jacobses have helped “pave the way for innovations that improve our world, and the endowment they're creating at Cornell Tech will do the same.”