New York University’s plan to expand its facilities in Brooklyn is moving forward, five years after the university signed a 99-year lease on a massive building in Downtown Brooklyn. To be built at a cost of $500 million, the new space at 370 Jay Street will add 500,000 square feet to the university’s existing campus in the borough, the New York Daily News reports.
Back in 2012, NYU was able to sign the lease on the property through Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Applied Sciences NYC Initiative. As part of the deal to take over a former MTA headquarters, the university agreed to pay $50 million towards moving MTA equipment and employees out of the building, and in turn the city provided the university with $15 million in benefits.
This latest push to expand the Brooklyn campus was largely made possible by donors Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon, who gave $100 million towards the new space in 2015. That gift also meant the renaming of the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering to the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, which didn’t necessarily go down too well with students.
NYU first released renderings for the Jay Street building back in 2014, and at the time the university announced that it intended to renovate and restore the space instead of overhauling it entirely.
NYU’s current space in Brooklyn spans 600,000 square feet, and over 5,000 students are enrolled at their engineering school. When the new building opens later this year, it will be able to accommodate 1,100 students and 40 faculty members. The Jay Street building will further bolster the university’s programs on engineering, applied sciences, and the digital media arts, among others.
This project is just the latest in a series of expansion projects the university is working on, which are all in various stages of development. In just a span of two months at the end of last year, the university decided to move forward with its 23-story sports facility in Greenwich Village, and revealed plans for a massive student hub on Mercer Street.
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