A gleaming vision of the technology school of the future was unveiled Thursday as Mayor Bloomberg officially signed over 12 acres of prime Roosevelt Island property for an innovative graduate-level college and tech start-up hub.
Under the terms of the deal, Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology — which joined forces to create the Cornell Tech school — will lease the site just south of the Queensboro Bridge for the next 99 years.
“Somebody asked me what happens after 99 years and I didn’t want to be blase or a wise-ass about it – but I did think to myself, ‘I don’t care,’” Bloomberg joked at a lease-signing ceremony at City Hall.
“Hopefully whoever’s around then will figure it out.”
Officials distributed renderings of the futuristic campus during the ceremony.
The hand-over allows ground-breaking for the first phase of the project to begin in January – with classrooms scheduled to open at the site in 2017.
The initial phase will include four buildings — including one strictly for academics and another that combines classrooms with space for technology companies.
It also includes a 27-story residential tower for students and faculty as well as an executive education center that will house a hotel.
About 2,000 full-time graduate students are expected to be enrolled when the campus is fully up and running.
The first classes already started this fall in temporary space provided by Google in its Chelsea headquarters.
The so-called genius school was the winning idea in a novel applied sciences competition held by the city several years ago, and is expected to generate $23 billion in economic activity over the next three decades.
It will also create more than 48,000 permanent and construction jobs and is expected to help launch roughly 1,000 spin-off companies by 2046, according to city officials.
The city provided the land and $100 million in capital investments to help spur interest from educational institutions from around the globe.
Three other major projects that stemmed from the competition will bring in an additional $10 billion in coming decades, according to city officials.