Genius idea has arrived
Cornell’s tech campus opens today
THE CORNELL TECH campus will officially open on Wednesday, almost six years after Cornell University was named winner of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s competition to build a “genius” school on Roosevelt Island.
The school, a partnership between Cornell and the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, will relocate from the temporary digs it’s occupied since its 2011 inception to three new buildings in the middle of the East River.
“If you look around the world, what you see is America’s great universities opening campuses in countries outside of the United States, and here you have an example of a great American university and a great international university investing their resources not just anywhere in America but in New York,” said Seth Pinsky, who worked on the project as Bloomberg’s head of the New York City Economic Development Corp. and is now executive vice president at RXR Realty.
The project began as a contest, pitched by Bloomberg, to build a tech-focused campus to rival institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The school — created through a competition that resulted in a gleaming waterfront campus — is one of Bloomberg’s legacy projects; at its groundbreaking in 2015, he donated $100 million of his own money to the effort.
The opening comes amid the significant growth of the city’s tech sector.
“It’s almost hard to believe, but eight or nine years ago, New York was really thought of as a technology also-ran,” Pinsky said, adding that Cornell Tech had already sent a message to the marketplace that “something big can happen, and is happening, in the city.”
Julie Samuels, executive director of the nonprofit group Tech: NYC, said the project provides a reminder that “we in New York do big and outrageous things.”
The school has already driven new talent to the city, in the form of students and professors, and spurred numerous start-ups. It arrives after an “explosion” of the tech industry over the last five to 10 years.
Erik Grimmelman, president of the NY Tech Alliance, said Cornell Tech will bring together academics and spur creation of start-ups in a formal way.
“That model has worked really well in Silicon Valley,” he said.