Amazon. com Inc. and Facebook Inc. are loading up on new office space in New York City, helping fuel an expansion of tech companies that is remaking a swath of Manhattan less than a year after Amazon dropped plans to build its second headquarters in the city.
The giant online retailer said it has signed a new lease for 335,000 square feet on Manhattan’s west side in the new Hudson Yards neighborhood, where it will have more than 1,500 employees. The new lease represents Amazon’s largest expansion in New York since the company stunned the city by abandoning plans to locate its second headquarters in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City.
The deal comes the same day The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is in talks to lease 700,000 square feet in a neighborhood nearby. Combined with Facebook’s other recent deals in the city, such a move would catapult the social-media company into the top ranks of the city’s largest corporate tenants, alongside JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. , which have had a major presence in New York for many years.
For Amazon, the new lease and accompanying jobs come in a manner that couldn’t be more different from its earlier dealings in New York. Amazon said it is taking the space—in a property being redeveloped at 410 Tenth Avenue—without any special tax credits or other inducements like those it had been offered previously. And this time, the company ran no cross-country tournament, in which some cities felt they were being played against each other in the contest last year for what Amazon termed its “HQ2” site and the jobs it would bring.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, both Democrats, had courted Amazon—and the company’s pledge to create 25,000 new jobs—by offering up to $3 billion in financial incentives. Amazon canceled its plans for the project after facing a backlash from some politicians and activists over the package offered to the company.
After the Journal reported on Amazon’s new lease, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), a vocal critic of the HQ2 effort who represents neighborhoods near the proposed site, tweeted, “Won’t you look at that: Amazon is coming to NYC anyway - *without* requiring the public to finance shady deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos, & corporate giveaways.”