Amazon buys NYC flagship Lord & Taylor store: Report
WeWork selling famous building for $1.15B to retail giant
Amazon is expanding in New York City with the purchase of the Lord & Taylor building, The New York Post reported.
The online retailer and web hosting giant is paying $1.15 billion for the property, according to the report.
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Amazon and WeWork didn't immediately respond to questions from FOX Business.
The 10-story, 660,000-square-foot building once housed the flagship Fifth Avenue store of retailer Lord & Taylor. It’s owned by WeWork, the co-working office space company, which picked it up for a hefty $850 million in early 2019.
Amazon will move about 4,000 employees into the building in about 18 months, the Post reported.
Rumors of Amazon’s interest in the building have circulated for the better part of a year. Last summer, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon was considering renting out the entire building.
Word of the deal dropped off over the following months. But during that time, WeWork has called off an IPO under financial scrutiny, undergone drastic leadership changes that included its co-founder/CEO’s departure and faced accusations of discrimination by several former employees.
Last month, word of Amazon’s interest came up again. But this time, the company was in talks to buy the building, The Real Deal reported.
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This wouldn’t be Amazon’s only office in New York. Amazon had previously considered Long Island City for its much-sought HQ2, but pulled out due to opposition to a sizeable incentive package that had been offered to the company.
However, Amazon still signed a lease in December for 335,000 square feet of office space in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards. The Journal reported at the time that more that more than 1,500 Amazon employees would be based there.
