By Dennis Holt
Brooklyn Eagle

BROOKLYN – Twenty-five years ago if someone had said Downtown Brooklyn was a college town, a correct statement, it would nonetheless have been greeted by snickers.

Today, when that statement is made, no one laughs at all. A lot of people are saying, somewhat smugly, that there are more college students here than in Cambridge, by golly. That is also true. All this comes to mind with the report in the Eagle this week about the eminent merger of Brooklyn’s Polytechnic University with NYU; the latter school needs an engineering component, and who better than Poly to provide it.

An under-told story is that the decline and despair of the Downtown area 20 some years ago came close to shutting down two of Brooklyn’s educational institutions, with possible repercussions on yet a third one. Times were dicey.

Because of its old plant and its downtrodden location, the future of Polytechnic was very much in doubt back then. The leadership summoned a stranger to the school from the Midwest, George Bugliarello, to see what could be done.

Simply put, his idea was MetroTech. A startling new setting, along with a lot of other hard work in the academic area, saved Poly from possibly having to close it famous doors. (At one time, one out of every seven American electrical engineers could claim Poly as their school.)

It wasn’t talked about much, but Brooklyn Law School was also on dangerous grounds, its enrollment slipping below 200. LIU began to spend more time with its Long Island campus than here in Brooklyn, and even St. Francis College, reaching a far different constituency began to get very nervous. It is impossible in this space to trace the detailed story of how each of these schools rallied as the Downtown scene began to change. One fundamental became self-evident: with Downtown Brooklyn looking pretty grim, who wanted to go to college here? When that grimness began to recede, students became more responsive.

And with the future looking better, the Downtown schools began to spend hard-obtained money on their physical properties. Brooklyn Law built the building that is now its insignia; Polytechnic, as part of MetroTech, built the Dibner Library; LIU began to create a new Brooklyn campus, and St. Francis began to explore how it could grow up because there were few lateral possibilities.

Soon, another critically important element began to be pursued by the schools here — how to create a 24-hour campus, meaning the need to offer housing. Housing was built. Brooklyn Law erected one of the most impressive of the new Downtown buildings, as did Poly; and LIU continued to expand its housing capacity.

This has had a compellingly positive reaction to Downtown Brooklyn and to the various schools. The merger by Poly with NYU is viable for reasons other that campus attractiveness and the overall boom in Downtown Brooklyn. NYU will bring permanence, stability, and capital revenues to Poly and therefore to Brooklyn that would have been impossible otherwise.

The bottom line is that there are bottom lines to Downtown’s college and universities, which was by no means a certainty a slight two decades ago.

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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