370 Jay Street

When it opened in 1951, 370 Jay Street signaled a turning point in American architecture. Designed to be the a central headquarters of the New York City Board of Transportation (now the Metropolitan Transit Authority), the building immediately set the tone for mid-century modernist office design. Its revolutionary facade gave way to executive offices, thousands of worker spaces, ground floor retail, and the counting house and money vaults for the entire city transit system. The building remained in use for decades. Eventually, however, the decline of the local economy precipitated the evaporation of its last retail tenants, and in 1990 the Transit Authority itself relocated to new facilities – leaving 370 to languish in disuse and neglect.

NYU was selected for the construction and operation of a new education and research center at 370 Jay Street, in downtown Brooklyn, under NYC’s applied science competition in 2012.

Since then, there have been a number of developments within NYU - and in Brooklyn itself - that have allowed the University to evolve and expand our plans for 370 Jay Street in ways that we think make for a more impressive and impactful contribution to the goal of making New York City a center for engineering and technology.

Those developments include:

• The formal merger of Polytechnic and NYU (2014) and the subsequent gift of $100 million to the re-named Tandon School of Engineering (2015).
• NYU’s growing expertise in emerging media and digital technology that called for collaboration among engineers, computer scientists, artists, game designers, and educators.
• NYU’s strength in “urban science”, anchored by CUSP and expanded to include a diverse range of other research-based disciplines.
• A transition of university leadership to a new president, Andrew Hamilton - a scientist, former head of Oxford, and provost of Yale - with a strong interest in strengthening NYU’s capacity in the sciences, including the applied sciences, and in developing NYU’s presence in Brooklyn.
• The rapid transformation of Brooklyn itself as a locus for tech and the creative arts, with MetroTech as a crucial leg in the “Tech Triangle” that also reaches to DUMBO and the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
  

Throughout a five-year process involving approvals from the Public Design Commission, NYU is renovating the entire 500,000 sq. ft. building from an underutilized office building into an innovation hub for engineering, applied science, urban science, digital technology, and digital media arts.

• Initially, of the building's total area, approximately 147,000 sq. ft. is designated for urban science education and research programs with an additional 48,000 sq. ft. of classrooms serving those programs; and 275,000 sq. ft. for academic and artistic programs that are new or expanding in the arena of digital technology and/or digital media arts (such as gaming, interactive media, and recorded music).
• As part of the building's research program, the University is planning to make available incubator space for start-ups connected to the various disciplines in the building.
• Approximately 20,000 square feet of ground floor (and some below-grade) space along Jay Street and adjacent to the improved North and South Plaza entryways will be available for retail use, as well as a range of “community-facing” uses for exhibits, lectures, performances, presentations, and training programs by existing and nascent public outreach programs including CUSP’s Citizen Science and Tandon’s K-12 STEM Education programs. These spaces will be designed to engage the surrounding community with the innovative work that the researchers, scientists, and entrepreneurs will be conducting in the building and in Downtown Brooklyn more broadly.
  

NYU’s design team explored replacing the building’s limestone facade with a glass curtain, but restoring the limestone preserves the neighborhood’s aesthetic character and is vastly more environmentally sustainable. Energy efficiency retrofits will decrease strain on local utilities and sustainable building practices will save some 4,000 cubic yards of debris – 133 30-yard dumpsters! – from the landfill.

NYU’s approach to construction prioritizes environmental sustainability.

At 370 Jay street, a multi-pronged strategy will massively reduce the building's historical energy footprint, in turn reducing the demands that the building will place on the local utilities grids (source consumption) and lowering emissions.

• A one-megawatt Microturbine will behave as a local high-efficiency/low-waste source of electricity, similar to a cogeneration plant, and allow new facilities to come online within the building without adding strain to the city’s grid. This microturbine's waste heat energy will be re-captured and recycled within the building to supplement the Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system.
  
• The limestone and steel façade will be restored rather than replaced – thereby reducing the amount of waste that would be sent to a landfill by approximately 4,000 cubic yards (that equals approximately 133 30-yard dumpsters). Additionally, NYU will install over 1,000 high efficiency windows with solar shading devices in order to reduce the reliance on air conditioning and to reduce energy consumption.
  
• Annual utility usage will be cut by more than 37% thanks to a "dedicated outdoor air" HVAC system with heat recovery, a Microturbine that generates electricity on site, and advanced metering and control system.
• The building lighting system will utilize daylight harvesting. Sensors within the lighting system will read the amount of natural light coming into a space and will automatically dim down the electric lighting levels in response to how much natural lighting is coming into the building.
  
• Additionally, the HVAC system will be supplemented by a massive thermal ice storage system. This system will allow the University to use electricity during non-peak energy usage times to create ice, which will then be melted by the waste heat generated during the air conditioning cycle during peak energy usage times. This cycle of creating ice using low cost energy and passively melting it during peak electric usage times will be carried out in cycles every day. This enables the University to reduce the waste heat dispelled out of the building during normal use and alleviates some of the pressure on the local electric utility as we reduce our need for electricity during peak usage times.
  
• Green roofing and reflective rooftop surfaces will reduce the heat island effect.

NYU is serious about revitalizing 370 Jay Street as a vibrant hub for neighborhood life, with renovation strategies including:

• updating the north and south arcades.
• reactivating long-dormant retail spaces along Jay Street and Renaissance Plaza.
• repurposing the Willoughby Street loading dock for CUSP’s Citizen Science program.
• enhancing transportation connections.
• installing high-performance lighting at entrances.
• investing in a public plaza with vegetation.

For additional questions, email community.engagement@nyu.edu or explore this project's FAQ for the parents at Brooklyn Friends School.