Today we'll hear officially that the City will award a huge bonanza of a new high tech campus, meant to generate jobs and put NYC on the map as the east coast Silicon Valley. And it won't be coming to Brooklyn. Congrats to Cornell and its consortium, which will build the state-of-the-art facility in city-provided land on Roosevelt Island. And thanks to Mayor Bloomberg for spearheading this ambitious initiative, which will help all of New York City.
But I have to say, I'm disappointed that the new university campus won't be at our very own Brooklyn Navy Yard, which was one of the options offered to contestants by the City.
To create 21st century jobs here in the borough of Kings, we're just going to have to build up our own burgeoning high tech corridor. In fact, that plan is already on the minds of some of the city's leaders.
At a meeting of the Real Estate Roundtable at the Brooklyn Historical Society in November, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and others outlined just that concept: a Tech Triangle linking Brooklyn's existing assets.
By "assets," they mean Brooklyn's already got the building blocks for a high tech corridor:
- An already sizable number of digital companies are now based in Brooklyn's DUMBO.
- We have an as-yet unharnessed academic tech powerhouse -- a confluence of tens of thousands of college and grad students studying in the Brooklyn Heights/Downtown Brooklyn area -- that could be linked to high tech businesses and incubators. This powerhouse includes NYU-Poly, an engineering university, as well as City Tech, Long Island University, and others.
- Not far away, the many buildings and infrastructure at the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard could be transformed into a high tech campus.
- And the gentrification of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, along with other neighborhoods, has brought to Brooklyn a new generation of young, educated, and digitally-connected men and women, just the kind of people who might work in high tech jobs (and then bike home and play in their rock bands!).
Brooklyn needs job creation. Alas, the future won't be handed to us on a silver platter. So what, this is Brooklyn. Let's roll up our sleeves and do it.
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