NYU announces $500M expansion of Downtown Brooklyn tech campus
In 2012, NYU signed a 99-year lease for the Downtown Brooklyn building at 370 Jay Street, a former MTA headquarters. Two years later, the University opened its Tandon School of Engineering in the neighborhood, and now that 5,212 students are enrolled, NYU is moving ahead with a $500 million renovation, restoration, and expansion of the Jay Street building, adding 500,000 square feet of space for areas of study such as computer coding, video game design, and digital forensics. The Daily News first shared the news, and they report that the new facility will open this coming summer, in time to welcome students for the Fall semester.
When NYU won the lease five years ago, it was under then-Mayor Bloomberg’s STEM-focused Applied Sciences NYC initiative. The deal said that they could take over the transit headquarters as long as they paid $50 million towards relocating the MTA’s equipment and remaining employees. In return, as the Times explained at the time, “the city agreed to rent the building for $1 a year to NYU” and “offered a $15 million package of breaks on taxes and energy costs and possibly some cash.”
Originally, the school was called NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, but when philanthropist couple Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon made a $100 million gift in 2015, the name was changed. This donation will also provide some of the funding for the new building, which will be NYU’s largest space in the borough (nearly doubling Tandon’s current 600,000 square feet) and accommodate 1,100 students and 40 faculty members. As for the physical building, when the renderings were first released in 2014, the school said it would get an energy-efficient makeover that includes replacing more than 1,000 windows and adding a wind turbine and green roof. They also noted that they’d repair the limestone facade.
NYU President Andrew Hamilton said, “Innovation and entrepreneurship have propelled Brooklyn’s economic trajectory and earned the borough bragging rights as the epicenter of New York’s burgeoning technology industry. NYU’s expanded presence in downtown Brooklyn will lead to innovative solutions to real challenges facing the world’s urban centers.”
The news comes on the heels of NYU revealing the official plans for its controversial $1 billion building that will replace their Coles Sports Center site at the corner of Mercer and Houston Streets in Greenwich Village.
[Via NYDN]
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Renderings via NYU
