Inside Harlems unlikely life-sciecnes boom

The $700 million Taystee Lab Building sits in the Manhattanville Factory District, but the laboratory goes beyond West Harlem’s manufacturing history.Surrounded by brick buildings on West 126th Street, Taystee spans 11 floors, with glass windows that overlook Columbia University and the City College of New York.

Inside any of the currently vacant labs, a fuzzy, fireproofing spray coats steel columns — code-ready for life sciences tenants in the once-industrial neighborhood.“Good, bad or indifferent, gentrification has transformed Harlem,” said attorney Larry English, a board member of the East Harlem Development Corporation and former chairman of Manhattan Community Board 9.“This is not the Harlem of 20 years ago coming out of the crack epidemic … West Harlem has the potential to be one of the epicenters of life science in the nation.”This potential for life sciences — roughly defined as any science that pertains to living organisms — reflects both the revitalization of Harlem and the industry’s growing New York City footprint.

According to Yardi Matrix data, Manhattan and Queens currently have 3.5 million square feet of life sciences projects completed or under construction, with an additional 2.3 million square feet in planned Manhattan developments. Across cities, life sciences endeavors “to discover things that help human beings that nobody’s been able to do before,” explained Scott Metzner, one of two principals at Taystee’s developer Janus Property Company, which also produced the neighboring Mink, Malt House and Sweets buildings.These projects create a commercial corridor that houses bio-tech tenants such as BioBus, Quicksilver Biosciences and biotech incubator Harlem Biospace.Yet New York’s life sciences efforts, both in and out of Harlem, have long been overshadowed by industry powerhouses like Boston and San Francisco.

Cambridge, Ma, especially, hosts innovation giants — most notably Covid vaccine-makers Moderna and Pfiz...