Amazon’s New York expansion plans will now include the former Lord & Taylor building in downtown Manhattan, as the eCommerce company announced that it will purchase the storied building from office sharing startup WeWork, according to the New York Post.
The price tag on the building, famous for being the former New York hub for the shopping retailer, is in excess of $1 billion.
The building’s current owner is WeWork, which has been having a difficult time as of late after a failed IPO and then the need for a bailout from SoftBank later. The building has 12 stories. It was sold to WeWork in 2017 for $850 million on the basis that it would become the WeWork headquarters.
This isn’t the only time Amazon has been involved with the Manhattan Lord & Taylor building. Last summer, Amazon mulled the possibility of housing its employees there via lease, as the building could have housed hundreds of employees. That would have fit under the umbrella of WeWork’s typical model of leasing out space to companies like Amazon.
Amazon looked at many locations in considering where to plant roots, including the Farley Post Office.
Earlier in 2019, the company froze its plans to build a new headquarters from scratch in Queens, promising to spend $2.5 billion over a decade and bring in tens of thousands of jobs as a result. Issues with rising retail costs, traffic and more ended up derailing the plans.
The company was drawn to the city for its abundance of workers in fields associated with technology. There are around 5,000 workers from Amazon already in New York doing business in various fields.
In other WeWork news, one of the company’s acquisitions, Managed By Q, is up for sale amid the cornucopia of similar sales as the office sharing company unloaded. Managed By Q’s founder, Dan Teran, was in talks to purchase his own company back, but the deal ended up being too much for what Teran was willing to spend.
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