Roosevelt Island, like the city's tech sector, is no longer isolated

This week marks the official opening of Cornell Tech's campus on Roosevelt Island and a major milestone in the evolution of New York's tech sector. If you haven't been to the campus yet, go. (You can now get there by ferry, in addition to the F line and the tram.) I was there a few weeks ago to see the first three buildings on the 12-acre campus, which has turned the island into a destination. These buildings—the House, a luxurious apartment tower for students and faculty; the Bridge, which has spaces for both instruction and collaboration; and the Bloomberg Center, an academic building funded in large part by the former mayor—total 850,000 square feet. Michael Bloomberg can claim ownership of the entire enterprise. It was his administration, after all, that conceived of the project in 2010 as a way to improve the city's ability to compete in the global economy. His hypothesis was right: A school focused on creating commercially viable innovations and partnering with the private sector could turn our educational industrial complex into a creator of local jobs rather than an exporter of talent. article continues below advertisement Now the future is here. In the six years it took for the first phase of Cornell's technology campus to come to fruition, New York's tech scene has grown by leaps and bounds. Employment increased by 46,900 jobs, or 57%, since 2010, making the sector the city's fastest-growing, according to a report last week by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. And these are high-paying jobs—averaging $147,300 annually. The endeavor seemed to create a virtuous cycle. Other universities upped the ante, with Columbia and NYU making major investments of their own, as senior reporter Matthew Flamm details. The de Blasio administration has supported the industry too, though with much less fanfare. In December it pledged $100 million to seed a life-sciences campus it said it hopes will "serve as an institutional anchor for the life-sciences industry, much as Cornell Tech serves as an anchor for applied sciences and engineering." Now the question on everyone's minds is whether New York has a chance of landing the big kahuna: Amazon, which announced last week that it wants to open a second headquarters for as many as 50,000 employees. Every North American city wants Amazon. And New York should pursue the opportunity with all the assets it can marshal. As with the applied-sciences project, the city that wins will get more than bragging rights. It will get a company that has the size and influence to transform an economy. Even one as big as New York's.