New York’s Silicon Alley Is (Still) No Match for Silicon Valley

Wednesday, Sept. 13, is a sweet day for New York City’s tech community. It’s the official opening of Cornell Tech, a new graduate school for technology on New York’s Roosevelt Island. The ceremony will culminate a dream of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who in 2011 invited the world’s top universities to bid to build a new campus on city property. The winner was a consortium of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.

To get the disclaimers out of the way, I’m a graduate of Cornell, I have friends at the Technion, and I work for Michael Bloomberg. But even if none of that were true, I would still be impressed by the spanking new, environmentally friendly campus, which sits on the former site of a city hospital on the southern end of Roosevelt Island, a skinny piece of land in the East River separating Manhattan from Queens. The school will offer master’s degrees and some doctorates in fields such as computer science and electrical engineering. Backers are hoping it will be a springboard for hundreds of tech startups that will change the world and, not incidentally, generate jobs and tax revenue for New York. (Cornell and Technion beat Stanford University for the opportunity to build the new school.)