A community college whose students could see people plunging from the windows of the burning World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, is getting $5 million from a family that had donated a nearby 15-story school building that was destroyed in the terrorist attack.
The Borough of Manhattan Community College was to announce the gift at its annual fundraising gala on Monday evening, spokesman Bruce Bobbins said.
Fiterman Hall, destroyed when another trade center complex building, 7 World Trade Center, collapsed on it, was named after Miles and Shirley Fiterman, whose charitable foundation is offering BMCC the largest cash gift in the college’s history. The $5 million is to be used for scholarships for needy students.
In 1993, Shirley Fiterman and her husband, Miles Fiterman, donated Fiterman Hall, a $275 million building that housed 40 classrooms, the school’s business and computer programs, an incubator for high-tech startup companies and the school’s virtual library.
Fiterman Hall was not occupied on Sept. 11. It had been scheduled to open later that month following a dedication ceremony. Ten BMCC students and alumni, however, were killed inside the trade center.
Bobbins said the hall, which suffered irreparable structural damage, will be dismantled and rebuilt in 2010 with private and public funds.
In the past dozen years, the Miles and Shirley Fiterman Charitable Foundation has given more than $1 million to the BMCC Foundation for scholarships.
Shirley Fiterman said she and her husband, who died in 2004, had been impressed with BMCC and the students “who work so hard to improve their lives through higher education.”
“We have always been pleased to support these efforts,” she said.
BMCC, which has several other buildings in downtown Manhattan, is the largest community college in the City University of New York system, with more than 19,000 students. It is the only community college in Manhattan.
The U.S Department of Education and the Institute of International Education rank the college as No. 1 in the Northeast in awarding degrees to black students and No. 2 nationwide in awarding associate degrees to minority students.
Miles Fiterman was a businessman from Minnesota who pioneered do-it-yourself housing in the 1960s, enabling families that otherwise could not afford homes to build them by providing materials, engineering plans, onsite help and financial services.
