MetroTech Middle turns into Brooklyn Commons and can get a $50 million overhaul

In its infancy, the self-contained MetroTech never made any pretenses about being an exciting or novel place to work. Largely cloistered from the rest of Downtown Brooklyn, it was a workaday urban office park and research center with no real architectural significance to speak of. Populating the campus were (and still are) data centers and back offices for several major companies (JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, and Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield among them), a modern campus for Polytechnic University (now the New York University Tandon School of Engineering), a smattering of fast-food joints, and not a whole lot else. Public programming in its commons was nil. MetroTech workers went in and then got out, and the most alluring aspect of the complex was its proximity to public transportation.