Cornell University has won the city’s competition with its bid to build an enormous science and engineering graduate campus on Roosevelt Island, but NYU is not out of the game. At a press conference Monday, Mayor Bloomberg announced that Cornell would not be the only recipient of funding for an applied science campus.

“The competition is not over,” Bloomberg said. “We remain in active discussions with three other universities: NYU, Columbia, and Carnegie Mellon.”

With broad community support, plans to revamp a dilapidated MTA building, and a budget a fraction of the cost of Cornell’s, NYU’s proposal for the Center for Urban Science & Progress (CUSP) graduate campus in Downtown Brooklyn still has a formidable a shot.  

NYU’s Senior Vice President Lynne Brown had this to say on the Mayor’s announcement:

NYU and its partners are enthusiastically continuing our talks with City on establishing a new applied sciences institute in Brooklyn. We believe our Center for Urban Science and Progress will have a transformative impact on the tech sector in Brooklyn, and – along with Cornell’s new institute – make New York a world leader in innovation and technology.

In what is a rare showing of local support, Brooklyn has been an active proponent of NYU’s plans, with two local groups recently launching an ad campaign backing the bid with taglines like, “Get smart. Go Brooklyn.” The CUSP campus was seen as a way to revitalize the blighted building and Downtown Brooklyn as a whole. An op-ed in Business Insider urged NYU to pursue its plans regardless of city funding.

“There’s something so brilliant about reclaiming the headquarters of one of the most bureaucratic, least innovative entities we know–the MTA–to build a campus focused on building the city of the future,” wrote Charlie O’Donnell.

But John Beckman, NYU’s vice president of public affairs, told us earlier this year that if the city doesn’t choose NYU’s plan, the concept of CUSP would stay on the table but probably would not get built anytime soon, and not to the scale it is currently conceived.

The year-long competition has not been without drama. Stanford, Cornell’s main rival in the competition, “abruptly” withdrew its bid to build a campus on Friday, according to the New York Times, probably to avoid what had become an inevitable loss. The same day, Cornell announced it received an anonymous $350 million donation–the largest in the school’s history–towards its proposal, placing the value of its 2.1 million-square-foot project at more than $2 billion, and all but solidifying its win. Cornell was also willing to spend more money than Stanford on toxic cleanup for the island, according to the Post.

The city will give Cornell the land on Roosevelt Island (currently occupied, among other things, by a creepy, crumbling smallpox hospital), as well as $100 million towards the campus’ construction. Cornell, in partnership with the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, intends to begin classes in a temporary space as early as this coming fall, a full year earlier than Bloomberg requested. As one source told the Times, ”There’s a lot of work to do, and a real desire to get things rolling in the time the mayor has left in office.” Wary of the time left to assemble his legacy, Bloomberg clearly wants this campus part of it.

The angled rhomboid buildings glinting in the sunlight in this rendering from Cornell’s Facebook page is, we think, quite ghastly, though other renderings show less caustic, rounded designs.

NYU’s plan for a urban planning campus would be a welcomed upgrade for Downtown Brooklyn, and an interesting academic endeavor in and of itself. We’ve said it before, but we’d love to see it come to fruition.

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